Attracting customers require a personality with consistency.
It requires authenticity – being who you are. It uses conversations to connect with potential customers. You need to have a genuine desire to help, an absolute belief in the quality of the offering, and a constancy of purpose or vision.
The development of these foundation factors are counter-intuitively focused internally on the business, not on customers!
Attraction is about being truly who you are as a business, and telling the world who you are. The right customers will be attracted to you. There is no need to “sweet talk” or trick customers into doing anything.
Be authentically who you are, tell them what you believe in, and they will come.
Coercion is more externally or customer focused. Specifically it means manipulating and controlling as many aspects of how you look and what you say in order to compel customers to your wares. The traditional tools are advertising and push-marketing. You tell customers their needs.
You start by working out how to get under your customer’s skin. What are their fears and desires? How do you create messages to tap into and manipulate those to your advantage? How do you look “the right way” to your customers? How do you tell them “the right things”?
With coercion, it doesn’t matter who you are as a business – you can say one thing and doing something else. You can pretend to be a big business when you are not. If you can scare your customers enough, they will buy the solutions from you. There is an arrogant assumption that customers will need, and can be coerced into needing what you have to offer.
Be who you think they desperately want you to be, tell them what you know they need from you, and scare them into coming.
Obviously there are two deliberately polarised descriptions. What do you think?
