7 Secret Buying Motivators — Part 3

Today, you’ll discover the final three secret buying motivators to help you grasp what drives your customers’ decision-making. Armed with this information you can better position your products and services to appeal to their wants and needs!

Buying Motivator #5: The Need to Nurture
The need to nurture is another powerful motivator, especially for people who find themselves in caregiver roles. This includes parents, people who have parents, people who are closely involved with their community and neighbors, and even pet owners. All these relationships are associated with a level of responsibility.

Understanding the need to nurture means positioning your products and services so they appear the best and most attractive for an individual to fulfill a certain responsibility.

With some individuals, the need to nurture is so strong, it over-rides basic self-interest. It’s not unusual for a parent to prioritize their child’s needs over their own, or a pet owner to buy gourmet food for their cat while they dine on ramen noodles!

The need to nurture drives people to make a wide range of purchasing decisions. Life insurance addresses an expression of the need to nurture. The person buying a policy wants peace of mind knowing that their loved ones are financially secure after they pass away.

Nurturing Beyond Necessities
While the need to nurture certainly influences purchases of many necessities, if you care for someone, you want to make sure they have food, shelter, and clothing. This nurturing need also drives customers to buy other, perhaps not-as-critically-necessary things, such as toys, jewelry, and smart TVs. Many people buy these items for loved ones, just because they know, or hope they will make the recipient happy.

Making someone happy is a nurturer’s ultimate goal. If you can help them do that on a consistent basis, you’ve got a customer for life.

The need to nurture IS NOT tied to gender. Both men and women are driven by the need to take care of others. Socially, we’re more likely to expect the need to nurture in women, but men carry that gene as well — so never make any assumptions.

Expanding the Need to Nurture
There are times that the need to nurture extends beyond immediate family and friends. A passion for the environment, human rights, the underprivileged, animals, or the community can easily fall into the need to nurture. Often termed social awareness, this motivation springs from people’s innate desire to care for those around them on a grand scale.

Environmental consciousness is one of the most powerful and visible manifestations of the need to do well. Companies that position themselves as “green”, with earth-friendly products, services, practices, and packaging, appeal directly to the need to do good.

Nurturers Require Transparency
The need to “do good” motivation has a real impact on the way an organization does business. Individuals with this motivation care about how your company treats its employees, raw materials used in any manufacturing process, merchandise, labor practices, environmental concerns, and more.

Nurturing and Cause Marketing
An effective way to appeal to customers driven by the need to “do good” is to offer them an opportunity to positively impact the world without fundamentally changing what they do in a day.

Buying Motivator #6: The Need for Self-Improvement
The need for self-improvement motivates individuals who always want to do better. This can exist on a personal or professional level.

Self-improvement addresses insecurity and inspires people to feel better about themselves. For example, if you want to be a better cook, buying a new set of pans can inspire preparing a better meal.

If someone wants to get into shape, they hire a coach; buy a gym membership, or their own exercise equipment. If someone feels inadequate at work, they often buy self-help books or register for online courses.

When people meet the need for self-improvement, they feel good because they now perceive themselves as smarter, sexier, fitter, more efficient, or some other flavor of ‘better than I was before I started’.

Competitions and reward programs resonate incredibly well with people motivated by the need for self-improvement because you’re giving them something tangible to strive for.

Similar to the drive for self-improvement is the passion for re-invention. Americans are particularly prone to this passion. If you’re not satisfied with your life, your job, your family, your career, it’s simply a matter of chucking it all in, and starting over, re-inventing yourself anew!

This motivation is more than just offering your customers the opportunity to improve themselves. You need to understand why your customers haven’t already made themselves better.

If you can tap into this drive, and offer your customers the tools and resources to transform their existence, you have the makings of a very lucrative business.

Secret Buying Motivator #7: The Need for Love
They say sex sells, and they’re right. The drive for love, sex, and passion in one’s life motivate almost everyone at some point in their life.

The sex drive is one of the strongest urges humankind experiences — in fact, it’s one of the primary needs on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

For a long time, people believed that appealing to the need for love, sex, and passion meant creating ads with scantily-clad people looking longingly at each other, preferably on a dark and stormy night with dramatic clouds rolling overhead, and a red sports car in the driveway.

Savvy business owners know that it’s critical to expand beyond the visual trappings of love, sex, and romance to really connect to their customers on an emotional level.
When you’re appealing to the demographic motivated by the need for love and sex, what you’re really selling is hope.

The premise is this: If you have the right product or service, then you can have the love of your dreams. Of course, you can’t beat people over the head with that message. Instead, if you’re positioning yourself to appeal to this demographic, you need to master suggestive selling techniques. These customers want to know that someday the dream can come true for them.

Everyone Needs Love
Both men and women are motivated by the need for love, sex, and passion. Many people assume that it is only women who want romance, but that’s simply not true!

Everyone wants to connect with someone, to be special, to be desired by someone, and to find their true love. Tapping into this universal desire, finding a unique, and compelling way to package your products and services in a way that best appeals to this group’s motivation, is a highly desirable recipe for success.

Summary
Now that you have all seven secret buying motivators, how are you going to use this powerful information to help influence, and persuade your customers to buy?

As a reminder, here are all the seven secret buying motivators:
Secret #1: The Need to Belong & Trust
Secret #2: The Need for Excitement and Fun
Secret #3: The Need for Easy
Secret #4: The Need for Importance
Secret #5: The Need to Nurture
Secret #6: The Need for Self-Improvement
Secret #7: The Need for Love

In a nutshell, here are four of the most important “takeaways” from this 3-part article:

1. Buying motivators influence the decisions people make — whatever they buy.
2. Buying motivators are the needs that influence customer’s purchasing decisions.
3. Take time to understand what makes your customers tick.
4. When you grasp what drives your customers’ decision-making, you can better position your products and services to appeal to their wants and needs!

Here’s wishing you much selling success!