You ever heard of Al-Ghazali? Smart guy. Wrote a bunch of books. They’re read and studied to this day. He wrote a treatise on Love. In it, he talks about the 5 reasons why we love. It doesn’t matter whether you sell products or services, they all apply in some way.
- Beauty – We love beautiful people and things.
- Function – We love useful things that serve us.
- Excellence – We love quality and attention to detail.
- Familiarity – We love people and things familiar to us.
- Kindred Spirits – We have a natural affinity to certain people.
Beauty
First impressions matter. You want to have a clean, professional-looking website, even if it’s a pre-built theme. Headshots and other photos taken by a professional photographer. High-quality images on your website and social media feeds.
And if you’re the business owner, you need to be mindful of your appearance; clothes, grooming, bodyweight etc. Everything about your business should look aesthetically pleasing.
Function
Your business needs to serve your audience’s needs. It needs to solve their problems and improve their lives. By using your product or service, they must become better versions of themselves.
Excellence
You need to hold yourself and your business to the highest standards of quality. Develop a reputation for excellent products/services and a superlative customer experience. Pay attention to detail because the little things do matter.
Familiarity
You need to be in front of your audience all the time. The more they are exposed to you, the more they will grow to love you. You must always be top of mind. If they think of you, their mind should immediately associate it with your product/service, and vice versa.
Kindred Spirits
When Al-Ghazali talks about this he’s referring to the spiritual connection between certain souls. In our context, we can think of it from the perspective of personal brand. If you look at the online business space you will see a TON of competition.
Take coaching and courses on how to effectively run Facebook ads, for example. Do you know how many ads I see every day selling that? What makes you buy from one bro with a Zoomer perm as opposed to another? It’s that feeling you get when you see, read or hear them: These are my people.
Putting It Together
You need at least 2 of these factors for your business to survive. If you have 3-4, you’re doing OK. To turn your audience into rabid fans and be beloved in the eyes of your customers, you need all 5.
How many of these elements do you have? Let me know in the comments.