Generate Customer Driven Value with the Pleasure-Pain Principle
Having a unique feature will get customers through the door, but it won’t keep them in the building. To build a customer base that keeps coming back, you need to focus on the user’s basic needs, then fulfill those needs with repeatable interactions.
Two outcomes drive most human behavior. A person makes a choice because it either brings pleasure or saves pain. I choose to listen to my favorite slow jams from the 90s because they take me back and puts me in a happy mindset. I choose to work from home because a daily commute in traffic wastes hours I’ll never get back. The best choices fulfill both imperatives: I choose to eat this fresh croissant from my favorite bakery because it tastes delicious, supports a local business, and I won’t be hungry and grumpy with my coworkers in two hours. Everyone benefits!
Considering the design of my platform in light of these two concepts is almost as important as my choice of daily pastries. As a product manager, you can use the Pleasure-Pain Principle to design interactions that will keep customers coming back. Look at the features you offer and categorize them. If you can’t easily evaluate the behavior, then it may be time to evaluate the value.
Pleasure
The pleasure principle is easy to understand. We naturally gravitate toward the positive. It feels good when users genuinely enjoy your product. You’re creating a rush of endorphins that brightens their day. Everybody wants that feeling!
Effective product teams go deeper. They focus on the behavior behind the outcome. To increase your effectiveness, start by breaking pleasure up into two categories.
1. Give users something they want and do it better than anyone else.
You aren’t the only bakery in town, but your muffins are second to none! People come to you because of the quality you offer and they’ll tell their friends to support you. If you do it well enough, your users will evangelize your product for you. It’s what we’re all seeking, but it’s also the hardest to achieve. Many products with passionate teams start here, with an idea to do something better.
Each method of driving value has pitfalls to be aware of. Doing something better is the easiest approach to understand. It’s also the one most likely to fail in the long run. Being better relies on user opinion and market perception. What works better for some users may be worse for others. Even if it’s the best in the market today, your killer feature will inevitably be copied. Worse still, someone is going to take your idea and improve on it. That’s the end of your product journey unless your team is constantly innovating as well.
2. Give users something they need and can’t get anywhere else.
This approach puts you in a more sustainable position. If you’re the only baker in town, then it doesn’t matter that your coffee cake doesn’t have a crumble top. People will still buy from you when they want coffee cake.
When you offer the only solution, you’ve got a captive audience. It’s a good start, but you can’t rely on being unique forever. Someone else can always set up shop across the street. Use your time as the only game in town to give you breathing room and improve your product. Learn about your customers so you can focus on quality and need. When your competition comes nipping at your heels, you want to have a solid head start with a loyal customer base in place.
Pain
Pain may feel like a bad thing to focus on, but it has a big impact on users. People are naturally hard-wired to avoid it. Even when pain is beneficial in the long run, it takes effort to ignore the immediate misery. You don’t burn off those pastry calories for 2 sweaty hours on the treadmill because it’s fun; you do it because you’ve put the long term weight gain as more important than the short term pain. You’ve made a conscious decision to accept short term effort to counteract long term pain.
Product design can capitalize on this natural avoidance to create a product that makes life easier and emphasizes the path of least resistance. As with pleasure, you can classify this into two approaches.
3. Take something that’s hard for them to do and make it easy.
Ever tried making croissants at home? It’s so much work! You have to make the dough, laminate the dough, watch YouTube videos on what laminating the dough means, freeze the dough, roll the dough, bake the dough. It takes hours! It’s exhausting! It’s probably not even worth it. Maybe I’ll just have a piece of toast. Or maybe I’ll quickly drop into my favorite bakery and have a hot buttery croissant for just $5. Oh, and I’ll take a hazelnut latte as well. It’s only $4 more, and a croissant tastes better with coffee.
Never underestimate the value of making someone’s life easier. We seek pleasure when we have time, but we avoid pain whenever possible. Your best ideas are likely to come from learning your customer’s pain points and solving them. Even smoothing them out can create lasting value when you multiply it across time saved every day.
In taking this approach, your enemy is time and complacency. Your relationship with your customer can turn from “You saved me so much time and effort!” to “Sure it works, but what have you done for me lately?” in the blink of an eye. Besides seeking new areas of improvement, your marketing team must consistently communicate value. Otherwise yesterday’s benefit will become tomorrow’s budget cut.
4. Take something they can get elsewhere but lower the price.
The last option isn’t glamorous and probably won’t excite your product team but ignore it at your peril. All things being equal, users will avoid pain in their wallet. Your local donut shop may not use locally sourced grain and a dairy provider where they can tell you the lineage of the cow that produce the cream in your coffee, but you can get a dozen donuts for $4. Bring those to your morning stand up and your whole team is happy.
Everyone loves getting a deal. Sometimes, if the difference is big enough, this pain will outweigh any pleasure you offer. When your target user base is a large company, it may not matter whether you have the best features for the users because the finance dept has the final say.
The downside here is as straightforward as the advantage. Your competition can offer price cuts just as easily as you can. In the worst-case scenario, this can trigger a race to the bottom that will kill your profit. Be aware of the positive effect price can have, but don’t undervalue your product.
Everyone is searching for the one feature that will revolutionize your industry and catapult you to the top of the market. It’s the holy grail, the silver bullet. If you’ve got that feature then you have a head start. But don’t lose sight of the fact that consistency is key, and you can build consistency by understanding the factors that drive your customers in every choice they make.
You will reach a point where an approach maximizes its value. When your gains start shrinking, then it’s time to layer your value. Take a basic feature that makes someone’s life easier and focus on improving the UI to make it a pleasure to use. Take something your killer feature that no one else can make and offer a temporary price cut if users sign up for a long-term contract. These are not standalone concepts; you can use them to best advantage as part of a long term strategy in which you truly understand what drives your customers.
