One of the things that’s got me this far in life relatively unscathed, is an in-built instinct for avoiding anything that exposes me to violence, crime and definitely violence and crime combined. Why I nurtured an interest in wristwatches then, is something of a mystery.

For many years, I had no interest at all. I had my granddad’s long service watch (and still do)  plus a cheap digital job and that was it. And then one day, Ian – a bloke in the gym – came in with a very fancy looking Bvlgari wristwatch he wanted to sell on behalf of his brother in law.  Apparently he  was moving to South Africa for 2 years and was in no doubt that wearing such a watch there would inevitably result in him losing an arm for it – or worse.

Anyway, I liked the look of it, thought it was a ‘proper watch’  (it isn’t!) and a deal was struck. I’d got the bug now, and so a few months later I bought another watch, an  Omega Seamaster…again second hand, but absolutely brand new. The bloke I bought it from had been mugged and beaten for his original watch, and had no desire to have the same thing happen with the replacement that had been supplied by the insurance company.

Can you see a pattern forming here? I couldn’t.

I wore the watches quite happily for a couple of years until one night, a young man of unsound character came into my house in the dead of night with a gun (never did find out whether it was loaded) and took away my nice Bvlgari. If it hadn’t been for the fact that he wrote to his mate in prison the following day, to tell him that he was coming back for my car at the weekend, he’d probably have got away with it.  As the detective said when I expressed my surprise at such bizarre behaviour, “If they weren’t stupid, we’d never catch ‘em”.

But I digress. Back to the watches.

With the insurance money, I really did buy a proper watch this time – a Jaeger LeCoultre Reverso. Over the next few years I bought a couple of other watches when something caught my eye, and I actually thought this was becoming a bit extreme. I mean, how many watches does one person really need?

And then I stumbled  across a website which totally altered my sense of proportion and perspective on the whole thing.

I started reading messages on the forum of this website, and every other post would be something like “This one arrived this morning.,” accompanied by a photograph of a timepiece which cost about the same as a decent second hand car. At first I thought it odd, that so many people had coincidentally bought a very expensive watch on exactly the same day, but after a couple of weeks  the penny dropped…

These folk bought expensive watches like other folk buy groceries!

I found that it wasn’t unusual for someone to buy two or three £2k+ watches in a single week.  They even have a name for themselves WIS…which apparently stands for Watch Idiot Savant. I’m really not sure about the Savant bit!  Site members frequently talk of the ‘hobby’ like some kind of addiction or affliction, and congratulate themselves if they’ve gone 30 days without making a purchase.

Can you imagine having a group of customers like that, wired into your business and what you’re selling?

Well the first thing I want you to consider,  is that there may well be such a group to be found, and they’re well worth thinking about and searching out. Most markets have a hard core of rabidly enthusiastic customers who will spend a disproportionate and unreasonable (to the rest of the world at least) part of their income on products or services from that market. Who are they in your business, and how can you attract them to you? Get them buying from you, and you can have a very profitable business from just a small number of customers.

The second thing it’s worth pondering in all this, is the illogical nature of the entire market. Leaving aside the junkies who buy dozens of expensive wristwatches, why the heck would anyone buy one at all?

For the price of the small change I have in my pocket, I can go out and buy a quartz watch which will tell the time at least as well (if not better) than any of the expensive mechanical ones I have in my collection. But I don’t even need to spend that, because my phone has a laser accurate clock on it too. So why would I buy an expensive watch (or several!). It seems illogical.

Indeed it is  illogical, as are a great many other buying decisions, once you get beyond products which fulfil the most basic of needs.  And yet when most people set out to create a marketing message for the product or service they hope to sell, it’s almost invariably based on logic. The folly of this with a watch is obvious because the lack of value resting in the basic function, versus the alternatives, is so obvious. But it’s less obvious with other products and services, and yet the same thing happens…people may justify their decision verbally by resort to logic, but they make it mentally by resort to raw emotion.

Want another example…how about the market for cars?

Almost every new car on the market today does everything you could reasonably want or need for transportation. Even the cheapest offerings from the far east are relatively  safe, fast, practical comfortable and frugal when compared with all but the most expensive models just a  few years ago. There is no logical reason to spend more than, say, £10,000 on a car. So for anyone to do so…and as I’m sure you’re aware, it’s perfectly possible to spend ten or twenty times that amount…the  motivation has to have come from emotion rather than logic. Car manufacturers know this of course, and so you’ll find very few logic based messages in car advertisements these days.

If your marketing messages aren’t targeted on the emotional appeal of your offering,  then you’re missing an important trick. By all means cover the logical reasons why someone should buy  (your customer is going to need those when he’s explaining himself to his wife!) just so long as you don’t lose site of the fact that it will be the emotional appeal that will push him to buy.

Speaking of wives, here’s something else which I discovered on that watch website which at first, didn’t make sense to me at all.

Most of these blokes (and yes they are all men…women seem to make their irrational and illogical purchase decisions in different product categories) can’t really afford to keep all the watches they buy. And so they tend to keep them for a while (and ‘a while’ can often be just a few days!) and then put them back up for sale to other site uses. But here’s what puzzled me – they very frequently offer their watches for ‘trade only’. In other words, they won’t take money for them, but will trade them with someone else for a different watch.

I just couldn’t understand  this at all. Why would you not want to sell your watch for money? With a trade you’re relying on someone coming along who just happens to have something you’d like to swap for. How can that possibly be better than getting liquid cash you can spend on absolutely anything?  When I discovered the answer – not only was it a revelation about the way other people live their lives, but it also provided a timely warning.  It’s not always easy to make assumptions about other peoples motivations in any deal.

Here’s the reasoning in a nutshell…these blokes had joint bank accounts with their wives who were unimpressed by their husbands watch related expenditure. Making a sale would involve a cash sum hitting the bank account. The wife would then be alerted to:

a)    The amount of money her husband is spending on watches
b)    A soft furnishings purchase opportunity

Neither of these things is desirable, hence the request for a ‘trade only’ deal which happens  without a paper trail or the risk of the watch fund being sacrificed at the alter of Laura Ashley.

Would you have figured that out for yourself? I wouldn’t, because it’s so far removed from how I live my life. And that’s the important point here. If you go into a negotiation assuming that the other side have exactly the same motivation and goals as you,  you could miss a lot of valuable opportunities. But if you take time to discover exactly what someone wants from a deal (and equally importantly, why they want it) it’s often possible to create a win-win situation that otherwise, wouldn’t happen.

These guys on the watch site don’t really want to trade, they just want to do a deal which doesn’t result in a large chunk of money landing in their joint bank account. Figure out a way to do that for them, and you’re going to be able to negotiate a lower price for yourself  while they get the flexibility to go and buy whatever shiny thing takes their fancy next. So everybody wins.  It wouldn’t really be rocket science to achieve that, would it?

I’ll  leave you with three timely (did you see what I did there?) questions….

1. Where are the WIS’s in your business?
2. Are you making the mistake of appealing to logic rather than emotion in your promotions?
3. Do you take the time to find the hidden motivations of everyone you’re dealing with?

I really don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that finding the answers, and then taking the appropriate actions, could very easily  catapult you  from just scraping by,  to an embarrassment  of riches.

And if you find yourself with some spare cash you’d like to blow on a nice watch, give me a shout and I’ll show you where to go.  Just don’t blame me if you get hooked…or mugged…or both!