The real reason I don’t buy from most brands (& the incredibly simple solution)

People have been asking me a version of the same question lately, and it’s a fair one. What makes you different? What makes Productpreneur different from the other agencies, the other coaches, the freelancer they could hire, the marketing person they could bring on staff? Everyone promises growth. Everyone has a process and a dashboard and a deck. So what’s the actual difference.

And I could answer that the way you’re supposed to answer it. I could walk you through our methodology and our senior strategists and our approach. But honestly, that answer misses the only thing that actually matters, and it would bore us both. So I’m going to answer it sideways instead, with a story, and a bit of a confession.

Here’s the confession. If you run a premium brand, I am your ideal customer. I’m exactly the person you’re trying to reach – the one who’ll happily pay full price, who becomes genuinely loyal, who tells everyone she knows when she loves something. So here’s a warning worth sitting up for. I don’t buy from most brands like yours. And if something already feels a bit broken or disjointed in your marketing, if you’ve had a nagging sense that it isn’t landing the way it should, your instinct is probably right. Stay with me for this one, because the brand I’m about to tell you about is one I should have been a customer of, and never was. And I didn’t even realise that until I got under the bonnet.

Let me tell you about a brand I had the privilege of auditing recently. I’m not going to identify them, because I’ve no interest in throwing them under the bus – quite the opposite. This is a beautiful brand, built by a genuinely brilliant, creative founder who knows her product inside out. Real expertise, real craft, the kind of person who could talk to you about what she makes for an hour and you’d hang on every word. The brand is several years old. It works. There are physical stores. This is not a beginner, and this is not a bad business.

But here’s the shape of her problem, and I suspect a lot of you are going to feel a small, uncomfortable flicker of recognition. She’s a product expert, not an ecommerce marketing expert – and why on earth would she be. Those are two completely different skill sets. So, like most founders in her position, she’s had to rely on other people to run her digital marketing. And over the last couple of years she’s been through the lot. A couple of agencies. A freelance contractor. A hire on staff. Every one of them promised her the world.

And every one of them didn’t just under-deliver. They actively damaged the brand.

Because here’s what they all reached for. Faced with a premium product and the job of converting people who’d never heard of it – and quickly discovering that asking cold audiences to pay a premium price in any product category is not that easy to convert – every single one of them went straight for the same tired playbook. Discounts. Sales. Urgency. Countdown timers. That little cluster of pressure tactics that the standard, off-the-shelf ad setup leans on to squeeze a conversion out of cold traffic. Slash the price, manufacture some FOMO, push, push, push.

Now here’s the thing about doing that to a premium brand. It doesn’t just fail. It costs you money in a particularly cruel way. Because when you discount a premium product, you don’t magically win a pile of new orders you wouldn’t otherwise have had. What actually happened for this brand is that the number of orders didn’t move. It stayed flat. All the discounting did was take the customers who were going to buy anyway – her lovely, loyal, repeat customers who already knew and adored the product – and let them pay less for it. So her revenue went down. Her profit went down. And her order count didn’t budge. She was quietly training the people who loved her most to wait for a sale, and paying for the privilege of making less money.

And meanwhile, the new customers – the ones all that discounting was supposedly for – didn’t show up. The discounts didn’t tempt them, because it was never about the price. They just weren’t coming.

Now, here’s the detail that tells you exactly where the problem lives. When this brand sells in person, in her actual stores, she never needs to discount. People walk in, they encounter the product, they understand it, they buy it at full price, happily. So this is not a product problem. It’s not a price problem. It’s not a “her brand isn’t good enough” problem. In the room, face to face, it works perfectly. Which means the entire problem is a digital one. It’s a communication problem. Somewhere between her brand and the screen, everything that makes someone want this product in person is getting lost. None of her platforms – not the ads, not the site, not the emails – none of them are actually communicating the things a premium, considered buyer needs to know before she’ll part with her money.

And here is the part that makes this personal for me, and the reason I’m telling you this story at all.

This is a brand I should have bought from. The products they make are things I have genuinely, actively been looking for. I was in the market. I was the warm lead of warm leads. And in over a year of their marketing – a year of ads and posts and emails going out into the world – not one single thing they put out ever once caught my attention or gave me a reason to look closer. I wasn’t just their auditor. I was their ideal customer, and I walked straight past them, for a year, while actively shopping for exactly what they sell.

How heartbreaking is that?

The person they most wanted to reach was right there, wallet open, looking – and their marketing didn’t reach me. So the question is why. Why does that happen – to me, and, if you run a brand like this, to your buyers too.

So let me tell you what actually makes someone like me buy. Because it is not the discount. It was never the discount.

What makes me buy is knowing something was made properly, and made to last. I recently bought a frying pan – and not just any frying pan. This one came with a multi-century guarantee. A guarantee measured not in years, but in centuries. The idea that I could buy this one object, once, and it would outlive me, and quite possibly my children and their children after them – that it was genuinely the last one of its kind I’d ever have to buy – that is the thing that sold me. Not the price. The permanence. I would so much rather buy one beautiful thing that lasts for generations than a cheap one I replace every couple of years and quietly resent every time it lets me down.

And speaking of being let down – let me give you an example of how deep this runs, and how badly the usual marketing misreads me. Recently I was shopping for pyjamas. And I wanted good ones. Natural fibres, beautifully made, made to last, the kind you keep for years. So I did what we all do now – I asked Google, and I let its clever new AI do its thing and make its recommendations. And do you know what it kept serving me? Cheap ones. It ranked everything by price, lowest first, and half of what it suggested were brands I had already tried and already been let down by – the ones that go bobbly after three washes, or feel lovely for a fortnight and then fall apart. The AI had decided, on my behalf, that the thing I cared about most was the lowest price. And it could not have been more wrong. I’d have happily paid three or four times as much for a pair I’d still be reaching for in five years. But the whole system, even the smart new AI layer sitting on top of it, is built to compete on price – and I am simply not a price shopper. So it talked straight past me. Exactly the way that brand’s marketing did.

What makes me buy is provenance, and craft, and knowing the story of a thing. I’m a keen cook – a proper foodie, and an absolute snob about it, I’ll happily own that. When it comes to my coffee beans, or the ingredients I cook with, I want to know where they came from, who grew them or roasted them, how they were made. I will go out of my way, and pay more, to buy from the local roaster or the small producer who does it properly. The story isn’t a nice little extra for me. It’s most of the reason I’m buying.

And underneath a lot of that is something I feel quite strongly, so I’ll say it plainly. I buy according to my values. I think about the environment – the food miles on a thing, whether it was made down the road or shipped halfway around the world. I think hard about who actually gets my money, and I would so much rather it went to a local maker or a small business than disappeared off to one of the giants. Because I want to live in a world where the local shop still has its lights on, where the small maker can still make a living, where our high streets and our communities are still vibrant and full – and not a world where everything routes through Amazon and a couple of others while everything else quietly boards up. Every purchase I make is a small vote for the kind of world I want to live in. And I take that fairly seriously.

I also buy according to who I am, and who I want to be seen as. I express my personality through the visible choices I make – the fashion I wear, the things I choose for my home. Those choices say something about me, and I want them to say the right thing. And I’m very health-conscious, which runs right through what I buy too.

Which brings me to something about the way I shop that most marketers completely miss – and it’s a big one. I don’t shop by category. I shop by what I’m actually trying to achieve. Not long ago I was focused on my health, and that single goal had me buying things that live on completely different shelves. I bought a yoghurt maker. I bought a kombucha brewing kit. Now, nobody on earth would file those two products in the same category. But in my head, they were direct competitors – because they were both answers to exactly the same question: how do I look after my gut, and my health. And here’s the kicker. The brand in my story, the one I should have bought from, exists to serve that very same need. Health was one of the real reasons I should have been their customer in the first place. But a regular marketer running that brand would only ever have compared it to other products in its own narrow category. They would never in a million years have understood that, in my head, they were up against a yoghurt maker and a kombucha kit and half a dozen other things that have nothing to do with their category and everything to do with my goal. They were competing for my attention, and my health budget, against a completely different shelf – and they never knew it. So they never once spoke to it.

And here’s one more, because it matters more than people tend to think. I need to see people like me in a brand’s world. If I’m buying for myself, I want to see myself reflected somewhere in there. And if I’m buying for someone else, I want to see them. Because if a brand’s marketing only ever shows me a person who is nothing like me, or nothing like the person I’m shopping for, I quietly stop believing the product is really for us. I don’t believe it was made with us in mind. And I move on, without ever really deciding to.

Now here is the thread running through every single one of those things. They are all things a brand has to tell me. I cannot guess a frying pan’s guarantee from a photo. I cannot read provenance off a white-background product shot. I cannot know a brand shares my values if it never once says what it stands for, and I cannot see myself in a brand that never shows a single person like me. Every one of those is a piece of information the brand has to actively, deliberately communicate. And the brand in my story communicated not one of them, in a year. So of course I walked past. They never gave me a reason to stop. That is the number one reason I don’t buy from most brands. Not the price. Not the product. They simply never tell me what I need to know in order to want them.

Now, I want to be really careful here, because it would be so easy to take the wrong lesson from all of this. I am not telling you that your buyer cares about food miles, or wants a multi-century frying pan, or is weighing your product up against a kombucha kit. She might not care about a single one of the specific things I care about. My values are mine. Your buyer’s will be her own, and they might be completely different. So please don’t walk away from this thinking the fix is to bolt my values onto your brand. That is not the lesson.

The lesson is the way I buy – the process, not the particulars. Because that part is shared by considered, premium buyers everywhere. We buy on values and identity, not on price. We shop by the goal we’re chasing, not the category you’ve filed yourself under. We need to see ourselves in you before we’ll believe you’re for us. We need to be told the things that actually matter to us before we’ll act. And a discount moves us not one inch. The specific values change from buyer to buyer, and from brand to brand. The consideration process is remarkably consistent. So the real question is not “do my customers happen to care about the things Catherine cares about.” The real question is, “do I actually know what my customer needs to know – and am I telling her, everywhere she’s looking.”

So why do so many brands, run by so many genuinely capable people, get this so completely wrong.

Here’s my honest answer, and it’s the crux of the whole thing. Because knowing how to run the machine and knowing the buyer are two entirely different skills – and our industry is obsessed with the first and very nearly blind to the second. There are a lot of genuinely skilled technicians out there. People who can build you a flawless campaign, wire up a perfect funnel, set up your tracking to the decimal point. That’s real skill, and I’m not knocking it for a second. But you can be brilliant at every one of those things and still have not the faintest idea what makes a premium buyer actually buy. Because that isn’t a platform skill. It’s not in the dashboard. It’s not a setting you can optimise. It lives in the customer, and most marketing training never once goes there.

So what you end up with is technically perfect marketing that repels the very person it was built to attract. Beautifully constructed ads, running the discount-and-urgency playbook, aimed at a considered, values-driven buyer who finds the whole thing a bit cheap and a bit pushy and quietly clicks away. The mechanics were immaculate. The understanding was missing entirely. And you cannot dashboard your way to understanding a human being.

Now here is why this is your problem, and not just a sad story about one brand.

Your best customers are people like me. Genuinely. The premium, considered buyers are the ones worth the most to you – the highest lifetime value, the ones who come back, the ones who become real advocates and bring their friends, the ones who’ll pay full price because they believe in what you’ve built. They are the whole game. And if the person running your marketing only understands the machine and not that buyer, they will, with the very best of intentions, quietly flatten your premium brand into features and price. They’ll discount to hit this month’s number, because that’s the lever they know how to pull. They’ll train your most loyal customers to only ever buy on sale. And it’ll look like it’s more or less working, right up until the day you notice your margins have thinned and your brand doesn’t feel special anymore and the people who used to pay full price are all just sitting there, waiting for the next twenty per cent off. That is not a hypothetical. That is the brand in my story. That’s exactly what a year of it did to her.

So, after all that, what is the answer. And this is the part I love, because it’s almost embarrassingly simple.

You ask.

That’s it. If the number one reason people don’t buy is that you never told them what they needed to know, then the fix is to go and find out what they need to know – by asking the people who already bought, and the people who very nearly did and then didn’t. You ask them what nearly stopped them. You ask them what they were worried about. You ask them what finally tipped them over, and what they wish they’d known sooner. And they will tell you, in their own words, exactly what your marketing has been failing to say. That is our Customer Intelligence Survey. That’s the whole secret. It’s the first thing we do with any brand we work with, before we touch a single ad, because everything else is guesswork until you’ve done it.

It costs almost nothing. It requires no genius. You could start this afternoon.

So why does hardly anyone do it. Why do the platform tacticians and the bro-marketer crowd never once reach for the single simplest, cheapest, most obvious lever available to them.

I don’t think it’s arrogance, exactly. I think it’s something more structural than that, and honestly more interesting. Their entire offer is certainty. What they are selling you is “I already know the answer.” I know the winning ad structure. I know the funnel. I know the hack that’s working right now. That confidence is the product. It’s the thing you’re paying for. And the trouble is, walking up to your customer and asking her what she needs to know is a quiet admission that the answer was never in their toolkit to begin with – that it lives in her, not in their playbook. Asking is a threat to the whole thing they’re selling. So they don’t ask. They can’t afford to.

And if that sounds familiar, it should – because it’s the very same thing I talked about last week. The people selling you the one magic lever, the “just crack this one thing and you’ll scale” merchants, are the exact same people who will never ask the customer a single question. And it’s for exactly the same reason. Because the question would reveal that it was never one thing, and that the answer was never theirs to sell you. It was hers to tell you, all along, if only someone had thought to ask.

So that is the real answer to what makes us different. It was never that we run better ads, though we do. It’s that we start with your customer – we go and ask her, we listen properly, and we build everything out of what she actually tells us – because we understand that buyer. And I understand her because, in most of the ways that matter, I am her.

If you want to stop guessing what your buyer needs to hear, you can genuinely start on your own this week, just by asking them. And if you’d like us to run that properly for you, and build a whole growth strategy out of what we find, that’s exactly what a Brand Growth Strategy Session is for. The link’s in the show notes.

So the next time your marketing feels a bit off – a bit disjointed, a bit like it’s shouting price at people who were never going to care about price in the first place – trust that instinct. And before you spend another dollar trying to fix it with a louder discount, go and ask the one group of people who actually know the answer.

I’ll see you next week.