The Difference Between Wants, Needs, and Immediate Needs

As a business owner, your job is to meet the need of your target market. The problem comes into play when you have to deal with what your target market wants. And what your market wants and what they need may not be the same.

To be a smart business owner, what you want to do is to understand what your amazing genius is, what it is that your target market needs, and what that intersection is in the middle of what you can provide to meet that need. For example, I have a colleague whose business is providing financial foundation for children. Her market is parents. What my friend was finding was that her target market was willing to spend money, but they were willing to spend money on things like hockey coaches, private piano lessons, and summer camp for drama and theater students, because that was the immediate need. How in the world is a financial basic foundation for kids an immediate need? It's not. It's not going to be an immediate need until the kid grows up and is in his/her twenties.

So your job as a smart business owner is to 1) understand your target market, 2) understand what they need, and 3) know what they want. People buy based on emotion. They want to relieve a pain or go after a dream. So your product or service needs to meet a want.

So how do you figure this out?

1) Ask them. The best way to do that is a survey, which is something you should be doing on a daily basis anyway to get into the heads of your target market. Get from them what it is they say they need, because what they say they need is what they want.

2) As you get into conversations with prospective clients about your upcoming products or services, listen. If someone doesn't enroll, ask her why it wasn't right for her. That may be a very difficult conversation to have. Don't do it in a very defensive way; it should be from a place of wanting to know. And then find out what the deeper reason was of why that person didn't buy from you. The first reason most people will come up with is money, and more often, there is a deeper reason. They may not want to commit, they're afraid of failure, or afriad of success, and you want to find out what those deeper reasons are.

3) Keep trying. If you launch a product/program/service and it doesn't do well, you don't quit. You try again. Maybe you tweak a few things here and there, and you try again, because you never know what the real reasons are. Every business owner I know goes through this. The key is to keep going even if something is a dud.

So take a deep look at what you're offering to your target market and think about how it meets their needs and how it meets their wants. Because the closer you can get to meeting their wants and providing an immediate need, the more successful you'll be.