The 3 Most Attractive Traits Customers Find In Startups
The 3 Most Attractive Traits Customers Find In Startups
How to win that date with your most coveted customers.
Photo by Toa Heftiba
With so many competitors vying for customers’ attention, it’s no wonder that entrepreneurs get night sweats thinking about the challenge of standing out as a brand.
Understanding how to be attractive to your ideal customers isn’t as easy as picking out a nice color palette and adorning your website with pretty words.
It requires a deep understanding of what your customer finds attractive in the brands that they buy.
There are three things that customers look for when starting a conversation with a brand — chemistry, uniqueness, and vision. Here’s how your startup can maximize its appeal to its customers by mastering these three things.
Chemistry
When you meet someone that you have chemistry with, the conversation flows naturally, you dig their personality, and you feel like you’re talking to a kindred spirit.
You foster chemistry with someone when your personality matches well with theirs and they like you too. Your interactions with this person are easy and you want to be around them all the time.
When you’re around this person, you don’t have to hide or suppress any part of yourself or use a corporate veneer. You can just be you because you’re talking to your people, who get you.
This is what your brand needs to do if it’s looking to be more enticing to its audience. You need to own who you are and only be concerned about how you come off to the people who already like you. Everyone outside this circle shouldn’t matter.
Owning this identity is what leads to developing a brand voice and perspective that feels like a human being. You should give off the impression that you know what you’re doing and are trustworthy, but also know how to let loose sometimes — because going on a job-interview-date every time someone opens your emails is boring.
Some startup brands to mimic that do a great job of this are: Blueland and Starface.
Uniqueness
Your brand doesn’t have to be incredibly eccentric to be unique, it just needs to follow the beat of its own drum.
When a potential customer lands on any online real estate from your brand, it should feel like its own expression. It shouldn’t borrow, look like, or steal any of the dimensions of any of your competitors.
There are so many copycats out there in numerous industries — why in the world would you want to make a competing soda outfitted in Coca Cola’s signature red or brand your co-working space with a logo that looks just like WeWork’s?
Your copycatting doesn’t create a positive association with your competitor, it just reminds your audience that they should check out your competitor after they exit your website. Or even worse, stay far away from you because rip-offs typically remind us of scams.
When crafting the design, language, and style of your brand, be conscious of whether it’ll stand as a unique fingerprint, or be a rip off of someone who’s bigger than you.
Vision
A leader with a potent vision is someone you want to follow — someone who’s ambition magnetically draws you to what they’re creating is hard to ignore.
If your brand takes its vision seriously and continues to carve that path as the business continues to grow, your audience will want to keep up with what you’re doing. There’s nothing more delightful than receiving an email every now and then about some cool, visionary thing that the brand is unraveling that excites its audience.
It’s kind of like dating someone who has a strong vision of where they want their life to go and what they’re working towards in the next 10 years. Direction, commitment, and ambition are attractive.
Seeing it in a business feels the same — when a business is on the ball about the future it wants to create, it gives its audience a shared purpose that they want to buy into.
We can use Warby Parker as an example — Warby Parker’s seeks to alleviate impaired vision around the world by increasing access to basic eye exams, affordable glasses, and giving vision care to school-age children.
They’ve held on to this vision consistently since they’ve first opened their doors and have helped 7 million people thus far. That’s a pretty strong vision and a demonstrated commitment that keeps customers coming back to do good through their dollars.
Are you building a healthy business that's poised to grow? Grab my free checklist to find out.