Selling mousetraps to people who aren’t shopping for mousetraps

“If a man can … make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Yes, if…

• The world thinks it has a mouse problem
• The world is unhappy with the way it is currently trying to manage its mouse problem
• The world has heard of this “better mousetrap”
• The world thinks this mousetrap might be better than what it’s currently doing to manage its mouse problem
• The world believes that the relief this mousetrap will bring is what the inventor is charging for it.
• The world is unhappy enough with its mouse problem and thinks that this mousetrap is a better-enough and reasonably-priced-enough solution that it is motivated to get its tired butt off the sofa, pull on its boots, and take the time to slog through the woods looking for the house where this inventory of mousetraps is waiting to be distributed.

There are plenty of articles out there about the mousetrap fallacy, and most of them talk about how making a great mousetrap isn’t enough — you need to advertise, you need to launch a major PR campaign, you need to spread the word, you need to print brochures, you need to put up a web site, etc.  In other words, mousetraps don’t sell themselves.

But there’s another issue:  Sometimes your best prospects are shopping for solutions to their mouse problems, but aren’t shopping for mousetraps.

I know whereof I speak because I myself have a mouse problem. His name is Billy, a 5-year-old jet-black cat whose life’s mission seems to be to rid my back yard of every one of its mouse inhabitants, carry said mice into my house, and set them free, where they can spend the rest of their days happily stealing kibble from the cats’ dishes and throwing fat little bacchanals for themselves among the rolls of gift wrap in my downstairs closet.

If you are selling better mousetraps and expect me to find you and recognize in you the answer to my mouse problems, you will likely be disappointed. Not that I have an objection to better mousetraps or that there is anything wrong with your better mousetrap. You might be selling the most exquisitely-designed mousetrap that ever snapped. You might have twelve patents pending, a fistful of five-star reviews from Mouse Traps Today, and Billy Mays screeching your better mousetrap’s merits all over late night television. But if  I am using the internet to help me shop, I will not find you, and not because you haven’t loaded up your website with all the pertinent keywords about mousetraps.

I will not find you, because you are expecting me to type better mousetrap into the Google search bar. I am not. I am typing better cat.

Back in the olden days, when the advertiser was the hunter and the customer was the prey, all we had to do was shout our messages somewhere where someone was likely to hear them, resting assured that she would put two-and-two together and buy what we wanted her to.

Now, with the internet, the customer is more and more often the hunter. We, the marketers who hold the answers to her problems, must do what we can to be found. And we need to understand that although we can solve the problem, and she is looking for a solution to the problem, the customer might not be looking for us. Even if the solution is a better mousetrap, the customer might be looking for something completely different. She might be looking for a better cat or a feisty rat-terrier or an exterminator or poison or an animal trainer or a hypnotherapist (so she can “become one with the mice”).

Moral: If we want to be found, we must be wherever our prospective customer is looking. If we want the customer to buy what we are selling, we must go beyond positioning our mousetrap as the best mousetrap available. We must even go beyond positioning our mousetrap as a solution to our prospect’s burgeoning mouse problem.

Lesson: We must persuade the customer that, of all of the options she is considering, the mousetrap we have invented for her is the solution that she’s been looking for. Even if it’s not the one she has been shopping for.