What do you want?

It’s the first question you should understand about your customers

by Julian Rogers

In business, everything else is downstream of one vital but basic question about your customers: What do you want?

Notice the word I didn’t use. Not “need.” That’s a different question. Hold that thought; we’ll come back to it, because the distinction matters more than most businesses realize.

What your customer wants is the foundation your business is built on. Not your capabilities. Not your process. Not the nine reasons you’re different from the practice down the street. Fail to divine and deliver what your customer wants, and your runway as a viable business is shorter than you think.

Sorry to be the one to say it.

But it’s that serious. If you don’t deliver what your customer wants, someone else will — happily, immediately, permanently. The moment they do, that customer stops being yours.

What that means for your web content and demand generation activities

Stop shaping your content around your capabilities. Start shaping it around your audience’s reality — their pain points, their pressures, the problem keeping them up at night. This isn’t about you. It was never about you. It’s about them.

Every paragraph spent telling your audience how “innovative” you are, how you “strive to be the best,” every polished bit of self-congratulation, widens the gap between what you’re saying and what they came to hear.

Here’s the uncomfortable part: your customers do not care about your innovation. You may believe it’s a compelling selling point. More often than not, they file it as a nice-to-have, at best. What they actually want is someone to solve their problem.

That’s your opening. That’s the whole opportunity.

Don't lead with your capabilities. Lead with their reality. Every sentence of your web content and demand generation should answer their question before it answers yours. It is not about you. It has never been about you.

Tried-and-true, cutting-edge, refreshingly old-school, unapologetically simple, or wildly out of left field — the method is beside the point. Solve the problem. Make it work for them. The more time you spend chest-thumping about your own brilliance, the louder you signal that you care more about yourself than your client.

Don’t be that guy. That’s the whole of my advice.

Be true to your brand, of course — don’t go chasing trends outside your lane. But if your brand promise doesn’t put the audience front and center, first and always, it’s time to rewrite the promise.

How much do I disdain the lazy brand promise of being “innovative”? So glad you asked. Read: Does innovation matter to your customers? I’ll give you a hint.

The trigger: want vs. need

Here’s where instinct meets evidence. (Nerd alert)

Decades of behavioral economics converge on an inconvenient truth for anyone who assumes customers weigh their options with cool, rational precision. Most don’t … most of the time. Somewhere between 80 and 95 percent of purchasing decisions are shaped by subconscious emotional factors rather than deliberate logic, a pattern consumer psychology research confirms again and again. Even the basic vocabulary of wants versus needs turns out to predict customer experience outcomes better than logic ever could.

Harvard Business School research gives the pattern its name: the “want vs. should” decision. Faced with a choice between what feels good now and what serves them later, people consistently choose “want.” They then reach for the rational justification afterward, not before.

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman mapped the mechanism in Thinking, Fast and Slow: fast, automatic, emotionally driven “System 1” thinking runs most everyday decisions, quietly overriding the slower, more deliberate “System 2” evaluation of what we actually need. By the time System 2 arrives to check the math, System 1 has usually already decided.

Consumer behavior research confirms it from another angle. Hedonic consumption (buying for desire, identity, status) consistently outpaces utilitarian necessity in driving frequency and impulse purchases. Keep in mind this is a study of consumer behavior in general, not healthcare consumers, specifically, or other professional clients-to-be. Classic marketing scholarship shows people will absorb more friction and more cost for what they want than for what they merely need.

Timing seals it. Research on temporal discounting shows we assign disproportionate value to satisfying a want right now over meeting a need somewhere down the road. The want wins today. The need can wait until tomorrow. And the elusive tomorrow never quite arrives.

Here is an example: At the end of January, I need to do my taxes. At the end of February, I need to do my taxes. At the end of March, I need to do my taxes. By the first week of April, I want to do my taxes. That deadline threatens me. And so I do my taxes. Need was there all along. Want makes me move on it.

Translate that into your world: if your content, your pitch, your homepage argue entirely from need — logic, features, specs, the “why us” — you’re making a System 2 case to a System 1 brain. You’re litigating the sliver of the decision that was ever open to rational debate, while the rest of it made up its mind before you finished your sentence.

Want, not need, is the trigger. It’s what turns a passive prospect into an active buyer — and it’s the thing most business content gets backward.

Where the jooj comes in

These two ideas are not separate. Knowing what your customer wants tells you what to say. Knowing that want (not need) is what moves them to act and tells you how to say it. Put them together and content stops being guesswork and starts working like gravity: something that pulls, instead of something that pushes.

Center your content on your audience instead of your résumé. Speak to desire instead of arguing logic. Do both, and you stop competing on price and features and start competing on relevance, urgency and want — the only three things that ever actually close.

That’s the work behind everything we build at jooj: finding the want hiding underneath the need, then shaping the positioning, content and demand generation that speaks straight to it. Because “what do you want?” isn’t just the first question you should ask your customers. It’s the only one that matters.