The full title of the book by Chris Stiehl and Henry Devries is
Pain Killer Marketing: How to Turn Customer Pain into Market Gain
In my review posted on Amazon.co.uk, I gave it 3 Stars.
Here is my review.
Potentially an interesting topic but the book was too broad in its scope
The book is about articulating the pain that your customers commonly experience and then showing that you have the solution to give them benefits and gains. My first impressions were very good. I learnt something from the first page of chapter 1 which was the fear of pain creates a continuum between the two extremes – confrontation and avoidance.
\When I read it, I was bitterly disappointed. It is a shadow of the important book it could have been.
I never felt that customer pain was properly explored in the book in terms of how it affects the customer’s thinking and emotions concerning a possible purchase. The book never even entered the debate about the pain avoidance issue which the initial chapter introduced. It provides some interesting information about how to survey customers but there is nothing earth-shattering in the advice.
The book also seems confused about the difference between customer value concepts which determine whether a customer wants to buy and then buy again and customer satisfaction. More mainstream customer value books are very keen to create distance between the two concepts.
For me, customer pain comes in three areas, all of which affect the quality of the relationship between buyer and seller and the critical distinction of how acutely the customer should feel the pain or relief.
There could be a fascinating debate about where helping the customer by allowing them to focus on the implications of their problem ends and where manipulation starts by making the prospect feels bad and guilty for not taking action. It’s not in the “Pain Free Marketing” book.
The book touches on how the House of Quality (Quality Function Deployment) can be to translate customer requirements into internal actions but it doesn’t go far enough.
The final stage of the “Pain Killer Marketing” book is intended to show you how you can use customer pain in your marketing. What we get is more like Marketing Tactics 101.
Some people may gain from the book but I can’t give it a general buy recommendation. The more I read, the more disappointed I was. It is 191 pages long and has 33 chapters so that’s less than six pages per chapter. Its scope is wide but the depth of coverage is shallow.
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