By There’s a line every marketing student hears in their first month. “People don’t want a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”
It’s usually credited to Theodore Levitt, a Harvard professor who liked repeating it to his students. It’s a good line. It moves you from the product to the problem it solves, which is where most businesses should start and most don’t.
It also doesn’t go far enough.
Nobody wants the hole either. They want the shelf. And they don’t really want the shelf. They want to be the kind of person who has shelves up. The one whose place looks sorted. The one whose friends come over and notice the books. The drill is the last and least interesting link in a chain that starts with who someone is trying to become.
I think about this every time a meeting starts with a list of features.
Features are easy to talk about. They’re concrete, they’re measurable, they fit nicely on a slide. Bigger battery, faster chip, 30% lighter. And they persuade far less than we’d like them to, because a spec sheet answers a question the buyer isn’t really asking.
They’re not comparing gigabytes. They’re checking whether owning the thing makes them feel a bit more like the person they picture when they picture themselves on a good day.
Look at any running shoe ad. Almost none of them talk about foam. They show someone running alone at 6am on an empty road, early light, looking like their entire life is in order. That’s what’s for sale. The shoe is the entry ticket.
Clayton Christensen, another Harvard professor, had a famous story about milkshakes. A fast food chain wanted to sell more of them, so it asked customers how to improve the product. Thicker? Sweeter? More flavors? Nothing it changed made much difference. Then someone went and watched who was actually buying them. A surprising number were people alone, early in the morning, on their way to work.
They weren’t buying a dessert. They were buying something to make a long, boring drive less boring. Something they could hold in one hand that would last the whole commute. The competition wasn’t other milkshakes. It was bananas, bagels and boredom. Christensen called it the job the product gets hired to do.
Once you see it, it’s everywhere. People don’t buy a gym membership, they buy the person they’ll be in three months. Most of them stop going within weeks, and the gym knows it, and prices for it. People don’t buy a nice notebook, they buy the version of themselves who writes in nice notebooks. Nobody buys an expensive watch to know the time. Their phone already does that.
There’s an old line about Harley-Davidson that people in branding still repeat. When your customers tattoo your logo on their bodies, you’re not selling motorcycles anymore. You’re selling a way of being a certain kind of person, and the bike is how you prove it.
Social media turned the volume up on all of this. We now buy things partly to be seen having bought them. The coffee in the photo matters as much as the coffee in the cup. Which means the product has a second job it never used to have: being evidence, in public, of who you are.
And it isn’t only luxury. The cheap brand sells an identity too: the smart shopper who doesn’t fall for marketing. That’s an identity. It’s just a less flashy one.
This can go wrong, and it goes wrong a lot. Promise someone an identity the product can’t deliver and they notice, usually around the second time they use it. The shoes don’t make you a runner. The notebook stays empty. And the disappointment lands on the brand, not on the dream.
So the features still matter. They just matter as proof, not as the pitch. Get the identity right, and the features become evidence that the story is true. Get it wrong, and there isn’t a feature in the world that will save you.
There’s something slightly uncomfortable in all this, and I don’t want to skip past it. If people buy who they want to become, then marketing is partly in the business of telling people who to want to become. That’s a lot of influence for an industry that mostly uses it to sell trainers.
I don’t have a tidy answer to that. I just think it’s worth knowing the next time you’re about to buy something and it feels like more than a purchase.
It usually is. That’s the point.
