The wholesome view of your business environment and putting factors of relativity into consideration can help your business identify new pockets of growth.
It may not be the objective criteria of what your product represents, how much it costs, its features or what problem it solves that leads to your product prosperity.
What you need to understand when it comes to offering your product into the market is that people are not rational thinking robots. People are subject to emotion and are profoundly influenced by the environment.
“... At times, you may not need to spend additional cash or change your business model & core practices. All you need to change is, Where it is that you do it ...”
For instance, a mental health product will be of premium value and highly beneficial to depressed-people-in-a-happy-country than to people in a country where everyone is generally unhappy ... You feel me!
There are many businesses that if they were able to change their lens from an absolute lens to a relative lens could find new markets, new niches and new ways of prospering.
PRODUCT POSITIONING
So I'd like to illustrate this point by using an example that Rory Sutherland always uses.
Imagine this scene; and I need you to picture this because I'm sure many of you have seen it.
Think of a car show car show where many many people are gathered in an exhibition hall and all the brands are vying for attention.
There's somebody here showing the new electronic vehicle, another there showing an ultra-luxury vehicle, a CEO unveiling a new model of an SUV that have not been shown before, models that are posing, journalists who are asking questions, high-ranking executives showing the features of their cars and so on.
In this hustle and bustle, in these big houses where are car shows happen, one of the things that you're seeing is a whole range of brands that have been put together against each other, all of them are trying to get the same attention that is on offer - for the journalist, media and the buyers.
In this place, I’d also like you to imagine two brands - a Bentley Continental GT V8 - really fast, really expensive, real luxury - set side by side against something like a Nissan 370 Z twin turbo demon - really fast, less luxury and much less in terms of the price tag.
So let's keep imagining this scene with both these cars side by side. When somebody approaches and sees both, one of things that happens when looking at the Nissan 370 Z versus the higher price tagged with admittedly better engine performance Bentley Continental GT, is that all of a sudden the Nissan 370 Z starts looking really really good.
In contrast the Bentley doesn't look as great as it would have been since it has been placed next to a lesser-performance compact car.
What you realize in that situation is that people start comparing what is lying side-by-side, instead of objectively comparing the features of all the other cars that exist in the market.
Consequently, In every car exhibition, what happened is that Bentley were the ones who were genuinely starting to show how good the other cars were.
So what they did at one point was brilliant. They decided to go and exhibit Bentley cars in air shows.
The people who were at these places would walk around to look at the fittings, the luxury interiors and the options offered by Gulf-stream, Learjet, Hawker and other private Jets.
If at leisure one could spend time looking at luxury fittings and asking about the options of 5/6/7 million dollars Jets and then while exiting they see a 250,000 dollar Bentley car, its tends to resemble the chocolates and sweets at the check out points of a supermarket - it becomes an impulse buy item.
Putting the mental state of this consumer niche into consideration, they brilliantly used the concept of relative deprivation to opt into exhibiting their cars next to private jet and not next to other cars.
And that's the type of place in which Bentley decided they could exhibit their cars.
The Trick Up Your Sleeve
They understood that it is not about the objective criteria or the absolute criteria about which their car represents - what it cost and what their features are.
They understood that people are not rational thinking robots. People are subject to emotion and are profoundly influenced by the environment.
And by doing that, they were able to move out of a very cluttered place and go to a place where their product will be able to prosper.
Now critically, neither did they have to spend more money exhibiting at the air shows than they were doing in the car shows, nor did they need to get a new business practice, e.g Sales activation was something that they always did.
All that they changed was, ‘Where it is that they did it.’
And so the impact of that cannot be overstated because there was zero increment in costs to doing what they were already doing. Instead what they did dramatically led to a drastic increase in sales.
I wanted to show you that this relativity - not looking at things in absolute terms but looking at them in relative terms - is where much of the pockets of growth exist for businesses.
The deprivation is relative; it's not an absolute limitation. The limitation takes place because of the relative differences that people feel.
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