No One Wants to Buy Your Recipe Book

This is not an article about pie. Nor is it an article about recipe books.

Instead, it's an article about understanding what your customers want. It's about empathy. It's about how you help them fulfill their dreams.

And it's about succeeding in business and life.

I use the recipe book analogy often when discussing effective marketing and/or business strategy. And the biggest point I want everyone to understand is that no customer wants to buy the recipe book. (Or, to put it in more modern terms, read your recipe blog).

But by this, I don't mean there is no customer out there for recipe books. What I mean instead, is that no one buys recipe books to have a recipe book. There's always a deeper why behind the behavior.

What you need to be considering, is the end goal behind that why. It's when you can identify that, provide a product that speaks to it, and are able to address this end goal, that you can truly succeed.

Let's Explore the Recipe Book Example

We have probably a dozen or so recipe books in our house. And, for the most part, they just sit there on the shelf, collecting dust. But when we do pull them out (or just do a quick Google search), the goal is not to find a recipe.

Instead, the real goal is to make food. And for the sake of this example, let's say I wanted to make an apple pie.

My goal is to make an apple pie. The recipe is just the means to that end.

Still, there's likely a deeper why behind it. Sure I want to make an apple pie ... but why do I want to make an apple pie? Is it to learn how to bake? Is it because I promised to bring a dessert to Thanksgiving? Do I want to create something aesthetically pleasing to share on my Instagram?

Maybe I'm just really hungry for apple pie. Or maybe it's apple season, and I just need to figure out what to do with all these apples I bought last week.

The point is, behind the why, there's another why. And it's through understanding these "whys" that we can position our businesses effectively in front of our customers.

I've worked across several different verticals in my 20+ years as a marketing professional, though the one I've spent the most time in is music publishing and sheet music.

It's in this area that I tend to bring up the recipe book analogy most often, as it's fairly simple to think of sheet music as a "recipe." They're both guides. Instructions to create something.

As I often tell my coworkers: people don't want to buy sheet music. They want to play a song. Our product serves a purpose well beyond its physical form. Above all, this is the most important thing to keep in mind when we're creating, positioning, and selling the product. And to take it a step further, there are multitudes of others. Who is this person? Why do they want to play a song? Do they want to play a specific song? Is it for themselves? For a wedding? Is it something their teacher assigned to them? Or will any song do, as long as it focuses on improving their overall skills as a musician?

The questions you need to be constantly asking are: What is the problem we are trying to solve? How does our product help solve that problem?

Yes, it can be considered basic marketing, but I find that quite often, amidst all the KPIs and iterations and creative design questions, etc., we lose sight of the truth behind what we've set out to do.

You can apply it concept to any business.

For example, for a year or so, I was the Chief Marketing Officer of an online swimming pool company. Most people would think that what I did in that role was sell swimming pools online. But I looked at it differently: what I sold was the ability for people to find relaxation in their backyard. Or to experience improved family time. Or to have a way to get in more excercise.

I never sold a pool, yet we sold a heck of a lot of pools.

In another role, I was part of the leadership team of one of the highest-grossing mobile games in the app store (it was a slot machine app). But the biggest argument I made while there wasn't that we were in the slot machine business. Or the gaming business. We were in the "pleasure" business. People don't play slot machines to push a button or pull a handle. They're looking for a way to get a hit of pleasure. Those "big wins" are one way, simple advancement through gamification and progression (levels, tournaments, etc) are another.

We didn't sell virtual currency, we sold a means to get a hit of pleasure.

The same is true of your business. Whether you're selling belts (people want to keep their pants up, as a fashion accessory they help define a person's exterior impression), selling headphones (people want to listen to music, they want to cut out external distractions, they're looking for a way to "better enjoy" music), or even selling recipe books.

The questions you need to ask yourself are: What is my customer's pie? And how do I help them make it?

Keep this question ever-present. There is likely more than one answer. And those answers may be ever-changing. You just need to be able to change with it.