The full title of this book by Bard Williams
The Justification Point: What Stops Your Customers From Buying Online and How to Change It – NOW!
In my review posted on Amazon.co.uk, I gave it 3 Stars.
Here is my review.
A summary of the things that matter when selling online but not the interesting concept I’d expected
I like the idea of a “justification point” which the author describes as the “exact moment when the scale is tipped and your customer actually makes the purchase.”
Sadly the book wasn’t as good or as focused as I wanted. The subtitle of the book is “What Stops Your Customers From Buying Online and How to Change It” and therefore I was expecting a list of reasons why customers look at a webpage and decide to click away rather than move forward.
It isn’t there. (Take a look at The Persuasion Slide)
What is here is a fairly short discussion of issues that can help persuade a customer to make a positive decision but isn’t a system for totting up points to tilt the decision scales in favour of buying.
I agree that it’s often a good example to meet the customers in the problem they want solved although I find the example the author uses to describe agitating the problem (making it feel worse and more urgent to correct) was weight loss when, if you look at successful weight loss promotions, they rarely agitate because it’s all to easy to be insulting but instead stress the benefits after the weight loss i.e. not fat, ugly and unhealthy when overweight but attractive, sexy and healthy when slim. I’m about 20kg heavier than I’d ideally like to be and I’m only too well aware of the problems but finding the determination to do something is hard.
Many years ago I played around with a similar idea to the justification point in my business coaching where people wanted the pleasure of the benefits but wanted to avoid the pain of the solution (cost, effort, risk, embarrassment etc). Again I used the idea of a balance scale where you had to keep adding the good or removing the bad until the decision tips.
I never reached a conclusion but guarantees and elements of proof played a much bigger role in my thinking than they do in this book.
Sadly the Justification Point remains an under-developed concept but I do think there is something in the idea that has the potential to be very insightful. It will need a much longer book. What we are left with is a fairly standard short summary of issues that can help sell more online.
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