An interesting point came up in the IMTW podcast this week and that was about product creation and human nature.

Human nature says that if you receive a physical product you will behave differently than you would with an electronic one. When you receive a physical product there are a couple of things you might do

a) open it straight away and consume the contents

b) open it straight away but leave doing anything with the contents till later

c) leave opening it till some other time

d) never open it

Compared to electronic products like music, podcasts and applications where the main reason for purchasing is you want to use them straight away.

According to some internet marketers, people value physical products more, and are less likely to request a refund, than they would an electronic product. I would venture to say that the imagined hassle of sending a hard product back to obtain the refund, or those people that delay opening or consuming the product, rather than the “perceived value” of something you can hold in your hand would be the reason why refunds are not requested.

The bit that got me though in the podcast was the admission that the move to physical products by the IM world is this reduction in refund requests…

Hold up there a minute, does anyone else see a conflicting message there?

For some reason all that talk by marketers about providing what their customers really need, and giving them all the information required to make an informed decision on their product, does not then gel with wanting to reduce refunds by creating a physical item.

Maybe it’s just me, but there seems to be a lot of lip-service being paid to what is best for the customer, which is then coming up against the tactics that are there purely for profit. The $64,000 question, which marketers really are only in it for the cash and which genuinely care for their community before the cash and create products because of that (and will ultimately be more profitable)?

Now Ed Dale did talk about product on demand and that sits a lot easier with me. If your market wants a product in physical form then that is great!. Yes it does open the can of worms about giving too many choices and so the customers chooses to make no choice; yet I would counter that with, “well how do department stores and Amazon make any money then?”. Surely they survive with a massive amount of choice, and customers do not seem so overwhelmed that they do not buy.

The choice statement again is about the MONEY and not the customer. It is SALES thinking, not relationships! It is old fashioned mindsets and we are in a rapidly changing world where control is not with withholding choice or information anymore. Internet marketers just cannot afford to continue to attempt being dictators, you must be an equal partner with your market (or more properly a service providor to your community – and how many old-school marketers can humble themselves to that position I wonder?)

This old-fashioned thinking will persist for a while unfortunately until someone can empirically prove to sales and marketing dinosaurs that a relationship is of more value that a single sale today, or until extinction takes place due to the inability or intractability of the old school to change. The catch cry of “we  will continue to do XYZ because it works” sounds just like what the flat earth people said just before the explorers sailed off the edge of the world and discovered riches beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

The pendulum is in motion though and you can bet your booties that SWBN will be ahead of it.