Positive marketing: more than taking the pain away

Marketing guides say: find the customer's greatest pain. This essay proposes looking for the greatest improvement instead, and takes the objections seriously.

You're looking for a number. Say, how many customers come back after a complaint. The search leads you to a study that promises exactly that, and next to it is a button: "Download now". You click. Instead of the study, a form appears. First name, last name, company, work email, phone number, all required. Below them is a checkbox with a long sentence about news and offers. For a moment you consider typing in a made-up number. You wanted to look up a number. Now you are supposed to hand over your phone number instead.

A form is a small questionnaire. It is made of the same input fields a researcher uses to find out what people need. Here the fields serve a different purpose: they are the price of a piece of information. The tool is the same, the purpose is not. That leads to the question of this essay:

Why are marketers taught to look for the customer's greatest pain when marketing theory has long focused on what benefits the customer?

In short: marketing theory has moved from the product to the customer. In practice, a simpler rule persists alongside it: look for the greatest pain. The rule makes sense, because taking the pain away is an improvement. But it is only one kind of improvement: someone who is no longer dissatisfied is not yet satisfied. The proposal of this essay: look for the greatest improvement rather than the greatest pain. Then the seller's interest is reversed as well: where the rule is "the greater the pain, the better", the seller benefits when it hurts more. Where the seller looks for the greatest improvement, the seller benefits when things get better. Whether that choice pays off has not been shown.

We'll take it step by step. You'll learn:

• how the textbooks got from the product to the customer, and what marketers are taught in practice,
• why relieving pain is not enough, and what that means for your next customer survey,
• what the same tool looks like when it is used to push: four cases, from a form to the price of a pill,
• what the objections are: pain sells better, pressure works, and nobody has shown that doing good pays off.

From the product to the customer

The history of the field can be told with two shops. In the first there is less bread than there are people who want bread. A line has formed outside the door. The baker doesn't need to ask anyone what they would like. His worry is the oven: how do I bake more, faster, cheaper? In the second shop thirty kinds of yogurt sit on the shelf, and in front of the shelf stands one person who can't decide. Now the oven is no longer the problem. What is scarce is the buyer.

Textbooks call the first case a seller's market and the second a buyer's market. In the first, a company thinks about production and distribution. In the second, it has to find out what the person in front of the shelf wants, ideally before it mixes the yogurt. The more goods there were, the more often the second case took the place of the first. Marketing started out as the art of getting goods to the buyer. Step by step it became the idea of running the whole company from the customer's point of view (this is how a German marketing textbook tells it: Gelbrich et al. 2008, pp. 2-7).

Two sentences captured this turn. The first comes from Theodore Levitt, in 1960. Selling, he wrote, focuses on the needs of the seller, "marketing on the needs of the buyer" (Levitt 1960).

The second sentence is six years older and comes from Peter Drucker: "There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer." (Drucker 1954, p. 37, cited in Webster 2009).

You can read the sentence to mean that a company creates wants, and Drucker's text allows that. I have always understood it differently: you earn a customer by making something that is useful to them. That is my reading, not the only one.

So much for the textbooks. In courses, guides and templates for practitioners, a different word often takes center stage: pain. It means a problem the customer has already noticed and that bothers them enough to spend money on it. The rule behind it is sensible. People often change a habit only when sticking with it costs more than switching. If you build a product for a problem nobody has, you build it for nobody. Understood this way, "pain" is just another word for what Levitt meant: start with the buyer's need, not with your own goods. Practitioners do use both words: one widely used template has you write down the customer's "gains" next to the "pains" (Strategyzer 2025). The question here is which of the two becomes the yardstick.

The rule goes wrong at three points. First, when the pain is not found but enlarged: you talk about the consequences of a problem until it weighs more than it did before. Second, when the rule turns into a yardstick: the greater the pain, the better the business. Third, when the price no longer depends on the benefit but on how few alternatives the customer has.

Then there is habit. Some moves in practice are passed on because they have been passed on before: you do it this way because the people before you did it this way. The form in front of the study can be an example, when it is adopted without anyone checking it for themselves. Does it bring in more than it costs in readers? No rigorous published measurement of that could be found. That doesn't mean nobody has checked it for their own business. There is a name for this kind of copying without checking: cargo cult. The name doesn't fit the rule about pain, which makes sense. It fits the moves that are adopted without being checked.

This has been on my mind for a long time. I taught marketing at a university, and what the textbook says is, at its core, a friendly idea: find out what people need, and do it well. In courses and guides for practitioners I often read something else: look for the greatest pain, the greater the better. I would rather look for the greatest improvement. Sometimes that is the same thing, because whoever takes pain away improves something. But whoever looks only for pain overlooks everything that people lack without it hurting.

It is a little as if we had learned how to handle nuclear energy and then built bombs instead of power plants. The picture has a limit: not every tool has two uses, and a power plant isn't harmless either. The comparison is about the big tools of the field: asking, testing, setting prices, offering knowledge.

The difference between the two ways of looking seems small, and yet it has a consequence. Anyone who makes the greatest pain the yardstick, the greater the better, gains when it hurts more. Anyone who looks for the greatest improvement gains when things get better. That says nothing about the intentions of the people who look for pain. It only says which way the rule pulls.

Why isn't relieving pain enough? Research has an answer to that, and it is older than the term pain point.

Not dissatisfied is not yet satisfied

The American psychologist Frederick Herzberg had engineers and accountants talk about their work. He wanted to hear two things: about a time when they felt especially good about their job, and about a time when they felt especially bad. You would expect the same things to show up in both stories, present in one and missing in the other: good boss, bad boss. That is not what happened. The good times were about a task that went well, about recognition, about responsibility. The bad times were about company rules, supervision, salary and working conditions (Herzberg 1968).

Herzberg drew a conclusion that sounds like a play on words at first: "The opposite of job satisfaction is not job dissatisfaction but, rather, no job satisfaction" (ibid.). He meant two separate axes: the axis of what bothers people and the axis of what pleases them. Clear away what bothers a person, and that person is no longer dissatisfied. That doesn't make them satisfied yet. Satisfaction takes something from the second axis.

You can try this on yourself. Think of a purchase that annoyed you and of one that made you happy. Compare the reasons. Often they are reasons of different kinds: in one case the delivery that never came, in the other something you hadn't expected.

In 1984 the Japanese quality researcher Noriaki Kano and three colleagues proposed a similar distinction for products (Kano et al. 1984). Three kinds of features have been at the center of it ever since. Picture a hotel room.

• What must be there. The room is clean. Nobody is pleased about that. If it is missing, people are very annoyed.
• The more, the better. The Wi-Fi is fast. The faster it is, the more satisfied the guest, and the slower, the more dissatisfied.
• What pleases. There is a handwritten note on the desk with two tips for dinner nearby. Nobody would have missed it.

In the research literature the three are called must-be, one-dimensional and attractive requirements (Berger et al. 1993, p. 4, and Zanger and Baier 1998, section 3.2.1). The classification doesn't stand still. Kano later showed this with the TV remote control: in 1983 it belonged to what pleases, in 1989 to "the more, the better", and in 1998 to what must be there (Kano 2001, cited in Lin et al. 2017). With hotel Wi-Fi, many people have probably seen it happen themselves: at first it was a pleasant surprise, and today people complain when it is missing.

The drawing shows what this has to do with pain. Anyone who looks only for pain looks in the lower half: at what is missing or what bothers people. Fixing what must be there brings the customer up to the zero line. With "the more, the better", an improvement can take the customer above it. The curve "What pleases" doesn't come up in this search, because when it is missing, nobody is hurt.

Psychology once made a similar point about itself. In 2000 Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote that since World War II the field had become "a science largely about healing" (2000, p. 5). They didn't think that was wrong, only incomplete: the field knew little about what makes a life good. They called the direction that was meant to change this positive psychology. That is where the word "positive" in the title of this essay comes from: repairing the bad is one thing, building the good is another. The comparison has a limit: mental suffering is urgent, and a missing note in a hotel room is not.

The term "positive marketing" already exists in research, though, with a different meaning: any marketing activity that "creates value for the firm, its customers, and society" (Gopaldas 2015). Something narrower is meant here: the question of what a company looks for in its customers.

In a 2011 talk the advertising executive Rory Sutherland tells a story about the British postal service. It delivered 98 percent of first-class mail the next day, he says, and set itself the goal of 99 percent. The effort "almost broke the organization". If you had asked people at the same time how many letters arrive the next day, they would have said 50 to 60 percent, according to his account. Sutherland's conclusion: when the perception is much worse than the reality, don't change the reality. Tell people about the 98 percent (Sutherland 2011).

Sutherland names no measurement, and the numbers are his. This essay reads the story differently than he does: not as advice to communicate better, but as a hint to look somewhere else. On-time delivery is to a letter what cleanliness is to a hotel room: it must be there. Whether 98 or 99 percent of letters arrive on time, hardly anyone is likely to notice, let alone be pleased about it. What would please a postal customer lies on the other axis. And you don't learn what lies there through more punctuality or better advertising. You have to ask.

That brings us to surveys. What we measure is what we repair. Many customer surveys ask about overall satisfaction and about what bothered people. The answers turn into a repair list. You need that list. But it rarely says what someone was pleased about, because nobody asked. If you ask only about pain, pain is mostly what you get back.

One more question

The second question is an open-ended question, and the question pair follows Kano's method. The wording of the questions was written for this essay.

The second row can go right next to the question about complaints. For a hotel, the question pair in the third row looks something like this: "How would you feel if there were a kettle in the room?" and "How would you feel if there were no kettle in the room?" Both questions have the same five answers. In the wording that is standard in English they are: "I like it that way", "It must be that way", "I am neutral", "I can live with it that way" and "I dislike it that way" (Berger et al. 1993, p. 5).

The two answers are read as a pair. Take someone who picks "It must be that way" for the room with a kettle and "I dislike it that way" for the room without one: for that guest the kettle must be there. Take someone who picks "I like it that way" with the kettle and "I am neutral" without it: for that guest it belongs to what pleases (evaluation table ibid., p. 6. The same table appears in Bailom et al. 1996, p. 121, cited in Zanger and Baier 1998, section 3.2.2). A must that is missing needs fixing. Something that pleases is a chance to make someone happy.

Asking has a limit too. It finds what has pleased someone before, and it sorts what you put in front of people to choose from. Somebody first has to come up with the note in the hotel room.

So much for the two axes. The next section shows what happens when the same tools are no longer used to benefit the customer.

The same tool in different hands

Four cases, from the everyday to the extreme. Each one involves a different tool of the field. None of them is the normal case in practice, and none follows necessarily from the rule about pain.

Knowledge. A study is there to pass on knowledge. The form from the beginning turns it into bait. The provider has a reason for that: usually they paid for the study and want to know who reads it. That explains the form. For the reader it changes nothing: they wanted to look up a number and are supposed to hand over their phone number. As noted above, little has been measured here. It remains an observation.

The input field. For a study published in 2022, four researchers sent a program across the 100,000 most visited websites, once from Frankfurt and once from New York (Senol et al. 2022, p. 1817). Wherever it found a field for an email address, it typed one in. It never pressed "Submit". Then the researchers checked where the typed address had gone anyway. On the visit from the EU it ended up, on 1,844 websites, with companies that track visitors across many sites. On the visit from the US that happened on 2,950 websites (Senol et al. 2022, p. 1813 and p. 1819). That is 3.0% and 4.8% of the roughly 60,000 websites on which the program was able to fill in a field at all (ibid., p. 1822). A consent window changed little: when the program refused all processing, the number of affected sites fell by 13% in the US and by 0.05% in the EU (ibid., p. 1821).

The wording. In 2021 Jamie Luguri and Lior Strahilevitz published an experiment with 1,963 American adults. In the middle of a survey the participants learned that they were being signed up with a partner company for protection against data theft: six months free, billed monthly after that. One group could simply accept or decline. For the second group, "Accept and continue (recommended)" was already selected, declining was hidden behind "Other options", and anyone who declined there had to click on the sentence "I do not want to protect my data or credit history". The third group, after declining, also had to sit through screens of information, each for at least ten seconds, while a timer counted down. At the end came a trick question in which "No" meant taking the protection after all. The authors call the second version mild and the third aggressive. In the first group 11.3% took the protection, in the second 25.8% and in the third 41.9%. Whether it was going to cost $2.99 or $8.99 a month later made no measurable difference (Luguri and Strahilevitz 2021, Study 1). Wording, preselection and the order of the steps: this is the same craft a survey researcher uses to compare two versions of a question and see which one people understand.

The price. Daraprim is a drug for the infectious disease toxoplasmosis, approved in 1953. Around 2010 a tablet cost about one dollar in the US. Under the next owners the price rose to $13.50 by 2015, and to $17.50 in June 2015. On August 7, 2015, the company Vyera, then called Turing, bought the US rights for $55 million. The next day a tablet cost $750, more than 4,000% more. Nothing about the tablet had changed. This is what the complaint filed by the US Federal Trade Commission and several states says (FTC et al. 2020, paras. 79-89). In January 2022 a federal court in New York ordered the founder of the company to pay $64.6 million and banned him from the pharmaceutical industry for life (California Department of Justice 2022). What was illegal was not the price. What was illegal was shutting out the competition: the company had kept makers of cheaper generic versions from entering the market. A price for a benefit is normal. A price that depends on someone having no way out is something else.

One tool, two uses

The last row is where the picture of the power plant ends: some tools have only one use.

You could say now: this kind of thing comes back to bite you. That has not been shown.

The objection: it works

Frightening people gets results. A review that pooled 127 papers with 248 samples and 27,372 participants concludes that messages that arouse fear shift attitudes, intentions and behavior in the intended direction. The authors found no conditions under which such messages backfired. The effect is not large (Tannenbaum et al. 2015, abstract: effect size d = 0.29). What was studied, though, were messages about a risk or a recommended solution. These findings don't say directly what that means for advertising a particular product. This shows, by the way, how much the picture of the power plant flatters the field: the forces at issue here are often modest.

Pushing works too. In the subscription experiment, even the mild version more than doubled the share of people who accepted. And these participants were not measurably more upset than those who got the plain question: on a scale from 1 to 7 their annoyance was 3.05, compared with 2.96. Only the aggressive version made people angry (3.94, Luguri and Strahilevitz 2021, Study 1).

On top of that, the line between being of use and taking advantage is blurry. The locksmith at night, the lawyer just before a deadline, the tow truck on the highway: they all charge more when it is urgent, and often with good reason, because speed costs money. Not every surcharge exploits an emergency. Where the price for a benefit ends and the price for having no way out begins can't be stated in a formula. The $750 tablet is the extreme case, not the ordinary one.

The strongest objection comes from the psychology of decision-making. In 1979 Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky noted: "losses loom larger than gains". Losing a sum of money, they wrote, seems to upset people more than gaining the same sum pleases them (Kahneman and Tversky 1979, p. 279). This is called loss aversion. A later review found the pattern far beyond money: bad events, bad feedback and bad impressions have more impact than good ones, and the authors found hardly any exceptions (Baumeister et al. 2001, p. 323). This leads to the strongest version of the objection: if pain that stops counts for more in people's minds than an equally large pleasure that is added, then pain sells better, and anyone who looks for improvements beyond pain seems to be at a disadvantage from the start. The two papers didn't measure that. They deal with sums of money and experiences, not with sales figures. But the conclusion suggests itself. Research on customer service says something similar: customers punish poor service far more than they reward especially good service (Dixon et al. 2010. The figures are in the article on the Customer Effort Score). Loss aversion itself is disputed, though: a 2018 review concludes that, on balance, the evidence does not show that losses have more impact than gains (Gal and Rucker 2018, abstract).

The objection also contains an answer to the question from the beginning, why marketers are taught to look for pain: pain is easier to find than an unspoken wish, the customer already feels it, and if the conclusion holds, it sells faster.

There are three responses to the strongest objection, loss aversion.

First, a loss is measured relative to a reference point (Kahneman and Tversky 1979, p. 277), and a really good thing moves that point. Before the smartphone existed, nobody suffered from not having one. Today a day without it hurts. What was an improvement a moment ago is, a year later, the thing you don't want to give up. In one experiment a group of students was given a coffee mug and allowed to sell it, and another group was allowed to buy such a mug. Half of the owners wouldn't part with it for less than $7.12, and half of the buyers offered $2.87 at most (Kahneman et al. 1990, p. 1339). People don't like to give up what they have. If that holds for improvements too, loss aversion eventually works in favor of whoever made something better. Whoever only relieved pain has a customer who is no longer hurting. What keeps that customer is a separate question.

Second, the same principle works against the seller. If the bad sticks more than the good, then the call that follows the "free" study and the subscription that can't be canceled also stick more than the benefit does. Pressure could then win the first sale and lose by the very rule it bet on. In the subscription experiment, though, only the aggressive version upset people measurably, and what the upset participants did later was not measured.

Third, pain that is gone is quickly forgotten. Nobody is grateful today for not having a toothache. Relief becomes the norm and slides into what must be there. The same happens to pleasure, as the remote control shows: both become normal. That is exactly why a seller who only relieves pain has nothing left to offer once the pain is gone. The search for improvement has no such end.

The data support only the reference point, the mug and the annoyance in the experiment. The claims that this leads to loyal customers, that pressure backfires later and that the search for improvement goes further are arguments, not findings.

One part of the objection stands in any case: the axis of what bothers people comes first. First, what bothers people has to go. Anyone who talks about pleasure when the product doesn't work has the order wrong. That is no argument against looking for the greatest improvement, because the greatest improvement is often precisely the relief of pain. It is an argument against treating the axis of what pleases as the more important one.

That leaves the question of whether doing good pays off in the end, because satisfied customers come back.

This story has no hero. Even companies known for well-made things don't qualify: in 2018 the Italian competition authority fined Apple 10 million euros, among other things because owners of iPhone 6 models were not told that updates could make their devices slower (AGCM 2018).

Anyone who bets on pain and pressure is not making an error of reasoning. Certain forms of pressure got more people to accept a subscription in the experiments described here, and it has not been shown that this backfires later. That is exactly why it is a decision. Rational does not yet mean right.

What you build from it

Put simply, there are two axes: what bothers people and what pleases them. The first has to be dealt with, and dealt with first: what bothers people has to go, and taking the pain away is a good thing. But you don't have to stop there, and the price shouldn't depend on how great the pain is. Looking for the greatest improvement means searching both axes. The field has had the tools for that for a long time. You just have to use them for it: ask what pleased people, and not only what bothered them.

If it is a decision, then this essay should end with one.

Whether this pays off, I cannot prove. I suspect it does: whoever looks for the greatest improvement finds more than someone who looks only for pain. But even if I am wrong: none of us invented the rules by which we do business. We were born into them, and some of it was already broken when we arrived. That doesn't mean I have to pass it on. I want to make things that are useful to people and that they like.

The knowledge is the same. What you build from it is up to you.

If you see it differently: Write to me.

Dr. Paul Marx

Further reading

• Customer surveys: an overview: when you can ask customers, and why satisfaction is made up of many details.
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): how the usual satisfaction question is worded and what its score tells you.
• Customer Effort Score (CES): the opposing view, with numbers: why customers often value less effort more than delight.
• Open-ended questions: how to ask what pleased people and how to analyze the answers.
• A/B test in a survey: how to make a fair comparison between two versions of a question, to understand rather than to push.

Frequently asked questions

What is positive marketing?

In research the term refers to any marketing activity that "creates value for the firm, its customers, and society" (Gopaldas 2015). This essay means something narrower: looking not only for the customer's greatest pain but for the greatest improvement. Relieving pain is one way to do that.

What is a pain point in marketing?

A pain point is a problem that a customer has already noticed and that bothers them enough to pay for a solution. Looking for pain points protects against products nobody needs. But it captures only what bothers people, not what would please them.

What is the Kano model?

Among other things, the Kano model distinguishes features that must be there, features where more is better, and features that please without being expected (Kano et al. 1984). They are identified with a pair of questions: how would you feel if the feature were there, and how would you feel if it were missing?

Does customer satisfaction pay off?

A small relationship has been shown. A review of 96 studies finds an average of r = 0.101 between customer satisfaction and company performance, and r = 0.349 under favorable conditions (Otto et al. 2020). A relationship is not a cause: successful companies can also afford good service more easily.

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Author: Dr. Paul Marx
Dr. Paul Marx is the founder and Managing Director of QUESTIONSTAR and was a professor of marketing at the University of Siegen.