The Problem Scale Can Guide You Toward the 'Heart Attack' You Seek
Plus: An update to my last article about market size
It’s a classic movie trope. The anxious hero, full of questions, finally gains an audience with the wise master. But the master’s answers leave him with even more questions than before. He dares to complain and receives an even more frustrating reply.
Good news: I do not aspire to be Yoda. You’ve got questions? I’ve got answers. To prove it, today I’m going to give you a clear answer to a question you’ve no doubt asked yourself many times: Does my product solve a real problem?
That’s right, we’re going to skip the part where I explain why the third criterion on my Divine Seven (D7) checklist — PROBLEM SOLVING — is so critical. Do you really need another article explaining why people buy products that solve problems? You’ve heard it all before (some of it from me). So let’s get right to it.
How can you decide if the product you like solves a real problem for people?
Answer: Use the Problem Scale.
Imagine a scale that goes from one to 10. At the far left (1) is a minor annoyance, like an itch. At the far right (10) is intense pain, like a heart attack. Actually, you don’t have to imagine this. Below is a depiction I used in my presentation at the 2024 Online Sellers Cruise last month.
Notice the “7” is larger than the other numbers. This is where you want to be on the scale, a seven or higher.
Divine Seven. Seven or higher. Yes, I like the number seven. Yes, it is an arbitrary choice. In this case, I use it to express the idea that you want the problem your product solves to be “high on the Problem Scale,” as we would often say in product-review meetings. The lower it is on the scale, the less pain your potential customer will be feeling and the less motivation he/she will have to “act now!”
Keep in mind, that’s what direct marketing is all about: engendering the impulse to buy now. In my experience, there is no better way to do that than to tap into someone’s need to end pain. That pain doesn’t have to be on the level of an actual heart attack, of course. Emotional pain can be just as motivating.
A great example of this is found in the commercial for the first product I ever worked on as a direct-response marketer. In my opinion, it dramatizes a problem that’s a 10 on the Problem Scale. See if you agree.
The great Collette Liantonio created this commercial in 2003, and I love how she hits both the emotional and physical pain of unwanted facial hair in just eight seconds. A young, unmarried man at that time, I assumed the physical pain of hair removal was the more powerful motivator. But then I was introduced to all the methods women were already using to remove hair. Waxing. Threading. Those insane EpiLady devices from the 1980s. Apparently, physical pain isn’t the biggest problem for women, which explains why Collette didn’t lead with it. It’s the emotional pain of “embarrassing facial hair” that hits harder.
Soon after we launched Finishing Touch, and it became a huge hit, we decided to launch the men’s version. To be honest, we did not engage in careful consideration of whether a micro-trimmer would solve a real problem for men. I’m pretty sure we just followed the pattern of the big razor companies and went for it. We left answering the Skeptic’s Question to our top male producer, the talented Fred Vanore. Below is what he came up with.
There is no doubt that sex sells. But is the fear of not getting the girl (or keeping the girl) because you aren’t “perfectly groomed” a seven or higher on the Problem Scale? Probably not. The same goes for worries about cutting yourself with a razor or poking yourself with a scissor. These all strike me as closer to an ‘itch’ than a ‘heart attack.’ Yet this commercial was also a huge success.
The reason, again, is that the commercial tapped into the emotional pain of embarrassment. The same sort of embarrassment, in fact, that drove women to buy a Finishing Touch. No one wants to have hair where it isn’t supposed to be. Women don’t want chin hair and mustaches, and men don’t want the series of problems Fred solved right after the MicroTouch opening.
Now that you have the Problem Scale, feel free to use it in your next product-review meeting. Find it very helpful you will.
But Wait, There’s More
I now have in my possession a copy of The Startup Owner’s Manual, the book I wrote about in my last article. When I received it, I immediately turned to the TAM section and learned … this book did not originate that acronym after all.
Author Steve Blank writes:
Marketers and their investors typically think of market size as three numbers; TAM (total addressable market), SAM (served available market) and target market.
If marketers and investors were typically thinking about TAM in 2012 (when the book was published), then the concept obviously predates the book. Maybe another author or professor thought it up. Maybe some unrecognized startup guy conceived it, and it went viral in Silicon Valley. The world may never know.
For those now also intrigued by SAM and target market as related sub-concepts, Blank visualizes it this way:
Here’s his example of this in practice:
The TAM for makers of a new smartphone app might be the 1 billion total smartphone owners worldwide, but if the application is available only in English or works only on an iPhone, the SAM or potential market served is far smaller. And the target market might be Apple App Store customers, so your next step would be to estimate what percentage of those shoppers might actually buy. Each estimate further narrows the target market.
In my analysis, this might mean starting with a TAM of ‘one per household’ and then realizing the potential market (SAM) was actually smaller because many “households” are not houses at all. We’ve encountered this with garden/yard products (e.g. hoses) for obvious reasons. As for target vs potential market, here the limitations of DRTV might come into play. That is, not everyone watches TV these days, and fewer still buy things off TV by calling phone numbers or visiting websites.
Later in the book, Blank stresses this sort of thinking, explaining that TAM, SAM and all other fancy acronyms and phrases are hypotheses that must be “verified by customer feedback and industry data” — i.e. contact with reality.
Back in the day, based on dozens of successful projects, I realized that our ultimate market size was about three million. That was the upper bound of the average number of units sold during an ‘As Seen on TV’ product’s life-cycle. The good news was selling that many units was more than enough to have a lucrative business and keep playing at the DRTV casino for the one project that would far exceed that number. (Finishing Touch/MicroTouch not only achieved that, it launched an entire line of lucrative products that eventually sold to Church & Dwight for half a billion dollars.)
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The Divine Seven
1. UNIQUE
(Article: Build the Marketing Into Your Product to Maximize Sales)
2. MASS MARKET
(Article: These 3 Powerful Letters Can Greatly Improve Your Odds of Choosing Hit Products)
3. PROBLEM SOLVING
(Article: The Problem Scale Can Guide You Toward the ‘Heart Attack’ You Seek)
4. PRICED RIGHT
(Article: What a Huge Walmart Mistake Can Teach Us About Product Pricing)
5. EASILY EXPLAINED
(Article: Never Try to Sell a ‘Swiss Army Knife’)
6. AGE APPROPRIATE
(Article: Why TikTok Advertisers Shouldn’t Sell Canes)
7. CREDIBLE
(Article: Don’t Even Bother With Products That Can’t Live Up to the Hype)