How do trust networks affect the satisfaction lifecycle?

At each stage of the satisfaction lifecycle, customers ask what we call essential questions. After answering these questions to their satisfaction, they move on to the next stage. Let’s explore how essential questions work as buyers move through the decision-making stage (the sales cycle, for sellers).

Essential Questions of the Satisfaction Lifecycle

The figure above depicts how the satisfaction lifecycle consists of development stages (market creation, sales cycle, etc) and development substages. Each defines an essential question, information and experience requirements (evidence), and a proven or acceptable procedure (generally consistent with common or industry practices) for developing a conclusion about the available evidence.

Essential Questions
A buyer asks an essential question that frames a need to know and a requirement for a particular answer. Each answer characterizes a set of evidence and a procedure by which to process the evidence (quantitative data, etc.) to the satisfaction of the decision influence team (business, family, spousal relationship), thereby creating a consensus. Often, commercial buyers use a procedure for assessing the evidence that comes from established industry practices and independent consulting and research firms that have developed models and best practice prescriptives.

Sellers develop marketing materials that attempt to answer these essential questions. In the final analysis, marketing and sales amount to nothing more than framing and answering the essential questions of customers. It has no other purpose. Therefore, brand managers must undertake a systematic effort to identify, frame, and codify the essential questions related to each satisfaction (product or service) that they sell. This requires activity-based research of buyers as they move through the satisfaction lifecycle for each product or solution category.

The best answers to buyers’ essential questions derive from the systematic profiling and research of a company’s most satisfied customers or of customers of similar products and services offered by competing firms. Effective brand managers correlate each branding activity and related artifact to these essential questions, asking, “How does this answer my key customers’ essential questions?”

In the course of doing this, brand managers will discover three important things. First, their key customer groups—as characterized by the demographic success model—ask the same essential questions and require, more or less, the same answers, evidence, procedure, and industry validations.

Second, brand managers discover that if buyers ask essential questions that other successful customers do not ordinarily ask, they will have encountered a customer they should not serve (one who won’t succeed with this particular branded solution) or that they have discovered an entirely new market category.

Third, brand managers will achieve great success in identifying and codifying essential questions by tapping the collective wisdom of their advocates and evangelists—individuals who have simplified the value proposition for each substage of the satisfaction lifecycle and perfected the delivery of just the right answer, and in just the right way, to each new buyer that they meet and want to convert.