The Alleged Art of Eliminating Pain-Points
On the intent behind building business models and marketing strategies
Every area matures after its jargons are set up.
To illustrate let me throw here the word ‘pain-point'. This hyphenated word has recently become popular in the business or marketing world. Businesses proclaim that their main agenda is removing these points that are such a headache for their customers or prospects.
Such topical words are necessary to create the area of marketing. This is similar to the phenomenon of associating ideas and abstract concepts like culture, nation-states, and life with a linguistic formalization of those ideas into jargons to exist as an entity.
And like all the other areas and abstractions, there can be an in-depth analysis of how these jargons connect with the topic or the area in the real world. Let’s get back to the word ‘pain-point’.
Solving problems vs/& Creating profit
Many businesses claim that they are trying to solve pain-points. If you check out the initial pitches of numerous startups and business organizations they lead with the fact that they are out there to resolve a certain pain point. And many of them are frankly and in all honesty conceptualized as a solution to a certain problem in the funnel. But not all!
For so many others, the idea of ‘pain-points’ has become just another gimmick to sell one more product or a feature. This not only leads to a diluted understanding of the market and the pain point, it also leads to a marketing strategy that is built on exploiting people’s vulnerabilities for sales.
Disadvantages of such intentions
The marketing or the GTM strategy that is devised on the premise of solving problems for only problem sake while not truly doing so might have numerous issues.
The strategies would focus on finding more and more pain points, close enough or remote, that can be associated with the product or service to inflate the probable demand. This not only dilutes the value proposition, it even leads to confusion while developing the product or writing services.
It puts all the onus on the eliminating of problems or finding an enunciation in terms of pain-point as the must-have for businesses. Products that create beneficial leverages in various workflows, but not necessarily eliminate them, are deemed lower in usability.
Is honesty still the best policy?
What I am trying to say is not that businesses should not say they are solving pain points, but that they shouldn’t be hypocritical about it. It’s a fact that a business is, after all, a business- it’s supposed to market and sell products and services. It is supposed to generate profit for its stakeholders. So, there should be no qualms in accepting this in front of your prospects. What shouldn’t be done is projecting the business idea as a world-saving, altruistic model that needs just ‘some’ money to survive and built the ‘world-saving’ machinery.
Of course, we need such world-saving, altruistic models of businesses. Many such organizations are there not for the profits but for eliminating one or some of humanity’s pain-points. And that is a magnanimous thing to do!
P.S. The next topic that I am working is about the value of content writing for marketing purposes. If you want to collaborate on this with me, feel free to send me a ping or email.