Who We Buy From: What New York's Small Businesses Taught Me About Standing Out

You are not the only one selling what you sell. There is another dog walker two streets over, another photographer with a nicer camera, another coffee cart closer to the train. You know your work is good. The question that keeps you up is why someone would choose you, and what you can do about it without a bigger budget.

I spent a week in New York in October, the most crowded market I have ever walked through, and I paid attention to who I chose and why. The pattern was not what I expected.

What the research says

Customers do not buy a product once. They move through a series of moments before, during, and after a purchase, and their judgment of you is built from those moments. In a review of decades of customer experience research, Katherine Lemon and Peter Verhoef describe the customer journey as a sequence of touchpoints across pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase stages, some of which a business controls and some it does not. They argue that experience is formed across the whole sequence, which means a single strong moment can shape how a customer remembers the rest (Lemon and Verhoef, 2016).

Earlier work by Valarie Zeithaml, Leonard Berry, and A. Parasuraman found that customers' judgments of service quality were linked to what they did next: whether they said favorable things, recommended the business, stayed loyal, or paid more. Poorer judgments were linked to switching and complaining (Zeithaml, Berry, and Parasuraman, 1996). The evidence stops short of a formula. Nobody can tell you which moment will matter most to your customer. The research does say the moments are where the choice gets made.

A practitioner tool I use with that research is “jobs to be done,” the question Clayton Christensen and his coauthors put at the center of customer work: what is the customer hiring this product to do for them? (Christensen, Hall, Dillon, and Duncan, 2016). It is a lens, not a study, and it is a good one for a crowded market, because two businesses that look identical on a sign can be hired for completely different jobs.

What it means for your business

Here are the three New York examples, told as a customer.

The cat cafe that sells a half hour. Meow Parlour on the Lower East Side books visits in time slots. You reserve online, you take your shoes off, and every cat in the room can be adopted through a local rescue. The pastry shop that started it sits around the corner because the health code requires it (DNAinfo, 2014). The job I hired them for was thirty minutes of calm in a loud city. They understood that job well enough to sell it by the half hour.

The art space that sells a feeling, with proof. Color Factory in SoHo includes treats from local partners in the ticket, puts photo booths with real cameras through the rooms, and changes its exhibits two or three times a year. Its chief executive describes the mission as joy and human connection through color (blooloop). I walked out with portraits I now use on my own websites. The job: feel something, and take evidence of it home.

Two drivers, same app, different businesses.

Same app, same price, same car category. The difference was one person deciding what the ride was for.

Notice what none of these businesses did. None of them was the cheapest option. None of them had the biggest sign. Each one picked a job to be hired for and built one or two moments around it that a customer would remember and repeat to a friend.

Ready to practice it

Moments That Stick is the NextReady Studio workshop on building the moments customers remember and repeat. Saturday, December 19, 9:00 to 10:30 a.m. Arizona time, live on Zoom, $39. Groups are capped at twelve.

Register for Moments That Stick

A Thrive Vibes Story tells the same New York week as an outing you can copy close to home: A cat cafe, a color factory, and two Uber drivers.