I have a new advice for the young entrepreneur an advice that starts before the hire a freelance web developer, find a co-founder, find a mentor. It is an advice that starts with soul of start-up, it starts with CUSTOMERS.
A start up is a young company founded by one or more entrepreneurs to develop a unique product or service and bring it to market. By its nature, the typical start-up tends to be a shoestring operation, with initial funding from the founders or their friends and families. One of the start-up’s first tasks is raising a substantial amount of money to further develop the product. To do that, they must make a strong argument, if not a prototype, that supports their claim that their idea is truly new or a great improvement to something on the market. Though a vast majority of start-ups fail, some of history's most successful entrepreneurs created start-ups like Microsoft (founded by Bill Gates), Ford Motors (founded by Henry Ford), and McDonald's (founded by Ray Kroc).
In India I have worked at several start-up companies all had the same aim was how to get attention of customers to make more and more revenue for themselves. Potential customers think in a thoroughly rejecting way: they look for a reason to reject your product. Only by assuming that mind-frame can you develop the insights and innovations necessary to come up with the right innovation. Only by intensifying the consumer’s rejection thinking can you get him to take a fresh perspective on your product or service. Every day, you and millions of other potential consumers make thousands of decisions. You are not consciously aware of most of the decisions you make, but you make most of them the same way, by reflecting on the drawbacks involved, and then picking that course of action with the fewest drawbacks (or the least painful ones). Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize winning economist, referred to this as “satisficing.” Instead of optimizing satisfaction and choosing an outstanding product in terms of its aspects in one particular area, we compromise on the best so that we do not get the worst in some other aspect. We don’t settle for the best in one area, but the least bad in all areas. The only way to understand how consumers make decisions is that they do not accentuate the “positive,” but the “negative.” The process of deciding is not about including more options and facets, but about exclusion. The analogy is one of a funnel with a lot of screens and filters inside: a lot may be poured in at the top, but only a small amount makes it all the way through to the end point (the decision by the consumer to purchase the product). Too many marketers think like street vendors. Their pitch involves a brief focus on one attractive point about their product. Take a walk with me some Sunday afternoon, around the Toluca Portales. So many happy couples and families; so many opportunities for street vendors. The balloon vendor attracts a crowd by making a sound of a strange bird. The popcorn vendor makes the sound of a steam whistle. The churro vendor sells not so much on sight, as by the smell of the donutty mixture hitting the hot oil. And then there is the vendor of the little wind-up toys. The child sees one and wants it. All of these vendors hope that their potential customers will think just like four-year olds, overly impressed with the first impression attractive aspect of the product, making a purchase decision before the unfavourable come into their minds.
The adult decision maker can’t keep the unfavourable from jumping into his mind and dominating his decision. The adult decision maker sees the cute helium balloon and thinks, we are going to mass in ten minutes, and do I want this balloon of a red devil soaring above me at church? The adult decision maker sees the popcorn, churro or snow cone vendor and thinks: will the kid be done eating in ten minutes? Probably not, so do not buy it now. Of course, when the family gets out of church is not a better time, because then they must go to Aunt Maria’s for Sunday dinner. Then the adult decision maker contemplates that windup toy. His child’s initial fascination is more than matched by these sober calculations: is it a safety risk? will it break before he loses interest (in which case junior will start to cry)? or will he lose interest before he breaks it? (in which case it was not a very good investment either), will junior be making noise with this toy all during mass? The adult does not have to come up with ten good reasons for not buying the toy: one is sufficient to veto the purchase. This rejection mind-frame dominates most product decisions that adults make. To make a sale, you must get beyond the (all too often unannounced) concerns, each standing as a sufficient obstacle.
Here are some businesses and the concerns involved.
AIRLINES: I fly a lot; I have to if I want to live in one country and show up for work in another. Each time I fly, I think how much I would like to avoid it. Most of these reasons are just reasons to avoid flying in general, but some reasons translate into avoiding specific airlines.
1. Those baggage limits bother me. Sometimes I want to bring more weight, more bags, an oddly shaped bag, or a live animal. Several times I have driven two thousand miles just so that I could bring something with me that I knew the airlines would bother me about. (Opportunity talking: if an airline just relaxed those baggage limits, they could get my business, at least on certain occasions.)
2. Losing Luggage. The only thing worse than not being able to bring luggage is to bring it, check it, only to have it lost. One airline (United) in particular has lost so much of my luggage I shall not give them another chance, even if the flight were free.
3. Getting to the airport is a hassle. I hate those shuttles. They arrive early, or late, and the drivers go like crazy to make the next pickup.
4. Parking at the airport is a worse hassle (which is the only reason I even consider the shuttles).
5. I must revisit the whole transportation hassle when I arrive at my destination. I would prefer to drive 300 miles to Phoenix from Redlands just so that I have my own car there when I arrive.
6. The food on the planes (and in the airport) is so bad that I started packing my own food even before some airlines stopped providing meal service.
AIRPORTS: I hate using airports, but as with airlines, I have to, in order to avoid the alternatives. Nevertheless, there are hundreds of airports that I have never used, and probably never will. It would be more precise to say that there are only a handful of airports on my list of potentials. All the other airports have at least one rejection factor that meant that I scratched them off my list.
1. Wrong city. Topeka may have a great airport, but I never had a reason to go to Topeka or the surrounding area, and doubt that I ever will.
2. Wrong route. Maybe the airport is close to my destination city, but my departure city is not on the other end of a route that it services.
3. Wrong airline. Some airports are limited to a few airlines. If they are the airlines that I refuse to fly (because of their unfavorables), then I have no reason to use the airport.
4. Too far. They are building a new airport for the Mexico City area, and putting it east of the city in Texcoco. Since I live west of the city, that makes the new airport too far. They can build it, and I hope it draws some crowds away from the airports I do use, but I won’t use it.
5. Too large. I hate LAX and a few other mega-airports that are just too big to be efficient or convenient. I just don’t want to go there. I will drive a hundred miles to San Diego just to avoid LAX.
6. Too small. Some airports are just too small to have a critical mass of essential services. I’ll wait until they grow a little.
7. Parking. At some places (e.g., LAX) the parking is just too confusing. At other places (e.g., Tijuana) there just are not enough long-term spots.
8. Public transportation. LAX strikes out again. There is no way I can just catch a public bus that takes me close to home.
9. Too far between connections. This is not just a function of size. Some relatively small airports put way too much distance between connections.
10. Too confusing. LAX strikes out again. Why a “Bradley terminal” instead of numbers or letters? Why some airlines depart from one terminal and arrive at another? Airline passengers are trying to assemble logical cognitive maps, and there is no excuse for making that process so difficult.

ATMs: Now a trip to the ATM is part of my daily ritual, but fifteen years ago I was a cautious adopter. There were many barriers which were eventually removed, but some financial institution could have sped up the process and got a new customer by removing these more quickly.
1. Complicated. At least initially, it was confusing going through the different screens. I could have overcome this in five minutes if some bank had set up an ATM inside the branch and had an attendant walk me through the steps.
2. Fear of getting mugged. There are still some locations I will not go to even in the day. One brilliant move was putting ATMs inside of public places (like malls and police stations).
3. Fear of bank errors. My wife had a bad experience with a debit card, so I cancelled that card, and just have the regular ATM with no Visa logo. I once went to a new bank to open an account, spending over a half hour with the paperwork, and then the deal breaker emerged. This bank only had debit cards, no plain ATM. I cancelled the new account.
4. Tellers are easier. For the first ten years of the ATM, many customers concluded that tellers were still less fearful and less risky. One bank (Bank of America) decided to pull tellers off the line in order to encourage its customers to use the ATM. (Of course, the long lines also encouraged many of its customers to check out the other banks as well.)

BANKS: I have accounts at a dozen different banks, and I am a former customer with as many. There are some banks I will never be a customer of (and some I will never be a customer again). Here are the rejection factors determining my selection of banks.
1. Location. This is a deal breaker. I will never be a customer of the First Bank of Tulsa because I have never been there and will probably never live or conduct business there. Even a southern California bank, with too few locations, would not become one of my banks.
2. Bad teller service. As I conduct more of my banking online, by mail, or by ATM, I need fewer and fewer teller contacts, but when I need to see a teller, I want prompt and effective service. One bad experience of service is usually sufficient for me to cancel the account.
BATTERIES: I hate batteries, the kind you have to put in flashlights and small appliances. I love my solar powered radio because it does not use batteries. Consider the unfavorables of batteries.
1. Shelf life. You never know how long they will last. More specifically: too often when you take them out of the package and put them in the device, they no longer work.
2. Wrong size. I don’t understand the need for all the different sizes. All I know is, when I need some batteries, that’s the size I don’t have, while I have all these stocks of dead batteries which have not been used because they are the wrong size.
3. Expensive. Enough said.
BOATS (and yachts, and jet skis). I don’t own a boat bigger than an inflatable Sevylor. The temptation is great, because in Long Beach I live right by the yacht harbor. The favorables are all there, but so are the compelling unfavorables (which might explain why they say that the two happiest days in the life of a boat owner are the day he buys his boat, and the day he sells it).
1. Cost. Yes, all of these water toys are expensive to purchase.
2. Maintenance. All of these require regular maintenance and/or repairs, everything from refinishing the deck to changing the oil in the motor. The greatest motivation for maintenance is that without it, when you arrive at your water destination with your boat, it does not work. (Of course, sometimes that happens even when you kept up with the maintenance.)
3. Training. As they get more complicated to operate and maintain, they require more training. The only reason people get the training is that when they try to do without the training, the level of frustration is much higher (and people avoid the unfavourable).
4. Storage. Everything has to be somewhere, and when the boat is not in the middle of the water with you at the helm, it has to be somewhere else, perhaps a berth, perhaps in your garage or backyard. That is a cost of money and/or space.
5. Transportation. If the boat is not stored in the water, it must be stored somewhere else and brought to the water. You will need a trailer and an apparatus of getting the boat into and out of the water.
6. Dangerous. Regardless of the amount of training and maintenance, boats are accidents waiting to happen, accidents in an environment which humans are unlikely to survive.
7. A better alternative. Renting a boat when you get there seems to avoid problems 1,2,4, and 5 and maybe the guy renting it to you will give you an impromtu version of the essentials of #3 training, and hopefully, he carries insurance for #6.
CABLE: For a long time I didn’t have cable TV service at my Redlands house, and still do not have it at Acapulco or Long Beach.
1. No time to watch TV. The first thing that popped into my mind when I see an ad for cable is: “I don’t have the time to watch all of those channels.” My situation changed when my aged father moved in with me and spent most of his waking hours in front of the television.
2. Installation. I knew it is too complicated to do myself, and I heard that it is a problem coordinating the right time with the cable company. Verizon’s easy installation convinced me.
3. Pricing. I have heard that they start you off with low rates and then jack them up after you have become accustomed to the service. Verizon finally gave me a great deal.
4. Alternatives. There was broadcast TV, until it went digital and I had to deal with the unfavourable of those conversion boxes. Also Fox kept putting on those “reality” shows and amateur talent shows, so those unfavourable got too high.
5. Disreputable companies. I had heard too many stories about poor service. Finally, I found a company (Verzion) that gave me good phone and FIOS internet service, so I decided to try them for TV.

CELL PHONE: When they came out, I tried one for a couple of months, but got rid of it.
1. Too complicated. Forget all the bells and whistles. Just give me an on/off switch, a dial tone, and big buttons. That might make me a late adopter psychographic that is on the wane.
2. Carrying. Maybe the young generation likes to wear these on their belts as a fashion statement, but I still do not have a place for it.
3. Charging. We are back to the battery thing again. Why can’t it just get charged by the sunlight or by the natural movement of my body?
4. Sound quality. I could not hear the voice on the other end half of the time. The newer phones are better.
5. Risk of loss, theft. I never really had it lost or stolen, but I was always misplacing it (once again, it never had a convenient place for carrying or even storage.)

E-BOOK READER: Many publishers have tried to convince my students that instead of buying traditional textbooks, a better alternative would be to purchase an e-book reader and then “cartridges” for the specific textbooks (at about half price) needed that semester. The way the salesmen calculate, the average student could save hundreds of dollars over a four year education. Most students have balked at this sales pitch, and I think they are demonstrating caution based upon perceived unfavourable.
1. Complicated. Any new technology is complicated, and the student fears not being able to use it. Until a critical mass of students starts using it, and then showing each other how to use it, the salesmen may have to demo the use of e-books.
2. Lack of compatible cartridges. It is not sufficient to say that some or even most textbooks will be available on cartridges. If one professor requires one textbook without a cartridge, the student has to go back to purchasing the old-style textbook.
3. Resale value. Students see their textbooks as an investment as well as a cost. Unless a new edition is coming out, students know that they can resell their textbooks at the end of the semester and get up to half their money back.
4. Alternative: used textbooks. What the salespeople fail to understand is that the e-books are not just competing against the new hundred-dollar textbooks, but in most cases, against the fifty dollar used textbooks.

FLASHLIGHT: I hate flashlights. Here is a great opportunity for someone to come up with an innovation that overcomes a lot of negatives.
1. shelf life. This goes back to the problem of batteries. When you finally need the flashlight, it is no longer working.
2. Breaks easily. There is something about those bulbs and the on/off mechanism that makes them just too vulnerable.
3. Positioning. I do not have three hands. Usually, I need the light so that I can perform some task with my hands. I want a flashlight I can position, or at least set down without rolling away.

FLOWERS: I no longer buy flowers to send to my wife or mother. Flowers have too many problems.
1. They die. I guess that’s part of them being fresh and perishable.
2. Delivery. On those few occasions when I used to purchase flowers, delivery time was the key: on Valentine’s Day, not the 15th of February; on my anniversary, not the day after.
3. Flower shops were all concerned about their attractive features: “look how festive this arrangement is” and never about my concerns. Sorry, flowers are not worth it for me.
HOTELS: We select hotels by a process of elimination.
1. Location. I do not need a hotel in Lawrence, Kansas: I’m not going there.
2. Ease of finding. I rarely make reservations anymore, especially on driving trips into Mexico. Too many hotels are simply too hard to find. So, I prefer to keep driving until I find a hotel that looks acceptable.
3. Getting there. When I am flying into a city, one thing I must worry about is getting to the hotel. I have even stayed at boring airport hotels, simply because they were easier to get to. Hint: having a free shuttle to the airport overcomes this unfavourable and is a major deal maker.
4. Wait staff hassles. I do not want to have to summon a bell hop to show me how to work the air conditioning or give me a glass of water. I want all the conveniences in my room and available from the outset.
DIAL UP INTERNET: We all started this way, but most of us did not stay because of the problems.
1. Too slow. As we perceived the need to do more (e.g., download music) we needed more bandwidth.
2. Telephone line. Remember your Aunt Ethyl trying to call up and she kept getting the business signal because you were online? Juno solved that problem by allowing you to download your email and work with it offline, so Juno had my email business for many years.
JEWELRY: I hate it and never buy it or wear it.
1. No need. The first thing that crosses my mind about jewellery is that I don’t need it.
2. Risk. Here is something small and valuable, too vulnerable to loss and theft, which means I must find a safe space to store it, and then insure it.
3. Inheritance. If the jewellery is so valuable that it becomes a family heirloom, that I must worry about who will inherit it, and what I tell my other heirs?
JUICER, FOOD PROCESSOR: We see their attractive features demonstrated on the infomercials, but I never think past the unfavourable.
1. It will not work, at least not as demonstrated.
2. What a mess to clean up. I would rather just buy the juice and throw the carton away.
KNICK KNACKS: If my wife is in the car with me, and I pass a garage sale, I will not stop if there are knickknacks.
1. They will take up space.
2. The novelty will wear off, sometimes by the time we get home.
3. They break easily.
LAS VEGAS: Although they heavily advertise their attractive features throughout southern California, I try to avoid this desert resort. I don’t gamble and don’t fear getting sucked into to gambling, so that is not the reason.
1. Crowded. I have never seen the place with a manageable number of people.
2. Unfriendly. Especially when it becomes apparent that I am not there to gamble or see the shows, the level of service I get deteriorates rapidly. I just don’t feel comfortable being there.
LUGGAGE: It has taken me over fifty years of traveling to find a piece of luggage that I actually like. Most pieces of luggage have one or more of the following problems.
1. Too small (at least for what I want to carry).
2. Too large (at least for where I have to put it).
3. Not durable (at least according to what airline travel requires).
4. Does not protect the contents. Too often I have to place my things inside of hard boxes or cans inside of the luggage.
5. Not flexible in size. What I need to pack does not match the dimensions of the luggage.
6. Hard to carry. Why did it take so many years to invent wheels and handles?
7. Hard to find things inside. I know it is in this bag, but where?
MOVIE THEATER: It is a rare occasion that I visit a U.S. theater to watch a movie. As much as I love movies, there are too many unfavorables, and it only takes one of these to keep me away.
1. Theater is too far.
2. Theater is showing the wrong movie.
3. Ticket prices are too high.
4. Popcorn is too salty.
5. Popcorn is too pricey.
6. Parking is too difficult.
7. Audiences are too obnoxious.

MILK: I have just about ended purchasing milk in the U.S.
1. Shelf life. I am only going to be there for a few days, and it hardly seems worth it. I won’t be able to finish it.
2. Complicated types. Is the blue carton the 1% or the 2% or the lactose intolerant? This decision is not worth two minutes of label reading with the refrigerator door open, so forget it.
MUSICAL INSTRUMENT: I don’t have one and probably won’t purchase one for a child.
1. Where to store it? My mother’s organ was a main feature of her living room for many years. My daughter plays, but how do we move that thing into her smaller home?
2. Lessons are expensive and inconvenient. I remember when my daughter was learning, we had to readjust our schedules to accommodate for the music lessons. Never again!
PET FOOD: I love cats, but I do not have one now. One factor deterring me from ever having one again would be the hassles of pet food.
1. Expensive. At sometimes, I think it cost more to feed the cat than to feed me.
2. Cat will not eat it. She was finicky, and we never knew if she would eat what we had bought.
3. Smells bad.
4. Hard to clean. Those special dishes were cute, but difficult to clean.
5. Hard to open, more difficult than containers of people food. Was this designed to keep the cats out? Well, it kept the people out, so I changed at least one brand because of this.
6. Containers too big. Hint: how about a meal sized container so that I do not have to refrigerate the remainder? (which she would not eat anyway because it is dry, cold, and hard).
7. Containers hard to dispose of.
PUBLIC TRANSIT: As much as I hate driving, when I am in southern California, I drive almost everywhere. The reason is simple: the downsides of public transportation outweigh the downsides of driving.
1. Routing. I want to go to the library or shopping, but the routes are all geared for someone going to the county hospital or the welfare office.
2. Schedule. The only people who find the schedules convenient are those who can plan their whole day around a bus trip.
3. Multiple short trips. I have about five different places to go to. Do I have to wait for five busses?
4. Place to carry and store things. With my car I can put stuff in the trunk, and then drive to the next spot, then bring everything home.
5. Proximity to undesirable people. Most of the people I meet on a bus I would not invite into my home.
6. Stations, platforms, and stops are unappealing, places I don’t want to be.
7. Drivers who will not stop, make change, or give information. What a difference from Mexican bus drivers! There the driver rents the bus and gets to keep the fare. The driver stops anywhere for a passenger and is motivated to treat the passenger nicely.

RADIO STATION: In the U.S., I spend most of my waking hours listening to an AM or FM radio station. Yet, most stations I have never listened to, and will never listen to. I make my decisions based on the unfavourable: eliminating those stations that do not meet my criteria.
1. Wrong location. There might be some great North Dakota stations, but I never get close enough to pick them up.
2. Poor reception. There are some great stations that just do not come in clear enough; sorry KNX 1070, you don’t serve the Inland Empire.
3. Wrong programming. If you’re playing rap, I’m not listening.
4. Too many commercials. If it sounds like a long block, I’m switching to another channel.
5. Obnoxious commercials. Sometimes one commercial is enough to get me to flip away if it is obnoxious enough. Sorry, KFI.
6. Boring announcers. Sorry, KFI, after Bill Handel you have about fourteen hours of “more boring talk radio.”
RECREATIONAL VEHICLES: I don’t have a motor home, and never expect to purchase one.
1. Storage. I am not going to be driving it most of the time. It looks too big for my driveway or garage, so does it take up most of my backyard?
2. Gas mileage. Just how much does it cost to drive a hundred miles?
3. It looks hard to steer.
4. Overnight hook-up fees at trailer park. Now its starts to compare unfavourably with its main alternative: the hotel.
RENTAL CARS: It has been many years since I have rented a car at my travel destination. The unfavorables are simply too great.
1. Cost. The basic cost of per day or per mile would be tolerable, but there are those add ons: taxes, insurance, gas refilling. You never know what you are going to have to pay.
2. Hard to get to pick up site or home from drop off site. The whole point is that I am starting off and ending up without a car. This is usually a deal breaker.
3. Wait for a car. One firm permanently lost my business because I had to wait for half an hour to have a car ready. (I had made a reservation and arrived on time.) The excuse I got was “the car is being vacuumed”). That sounded like “the check is in the mail” and why didn’t they ask me my preference: dirty car now or clean car later. Time was my key concern, and waiting for it was an intolerable factor.
4. Downtown parking. After I have the car, where do I put it when I am not driving?
5. Alternatives. The more I used rental cars, the better the alternatives looked: taxi, public transportation, local friends. I have even driven out of state instead of flying simply because I would rather have my own car at the destination rather than relying upon a rental car.
RESTAURANT: I don’t eat in restaurants that often, but when I do, I select solely on the avoidance of unfavorables.
1. Location. The restaurant must be in a location convenient to where I am or where I can get to. Few restaurants have such compelling features that I am going to drive there and look for them.
2. Type of food. Ninety percent of restaurants offer food that I prefer to avoid. I scratch them off my list. Other customers scratch restaurants off their lists because of food aversions, religious objections, etc.
3. Wait staff. Some are too slow; some are too surly or too aggressive. The buffet alternative looks better and better to me, especially because I also get to see the food.
4. Price. In addition to being too expensive, some places will not accept credit cards.
5. Fear of fraud. Especially with foreign restaurants, there is a growing fear that some employee will take the credit card number and use it fraudulently.
SPORTS: I no longer go to professional sporting events. The attractive are strong, but…
1. Cost of tickets
2. Traffic to and from the game
3. Parking cost and hassles
4. Bathroom availability and delays
5. Cost of food, drinks, souvenirs
SATELLITE DISH: I have thought of this as an alternative to cable several times, but I figure that it has many of the same problems as cable, plus
1. May not work well in certain locations
2. May not work well in certain kinds of weather
SHOES: Although my closet is full of shoes, each year I buy a few pair, but when I do, I always use the approach of outlining the rejection factors.
1. Wrong size. Most pairs of shoes in the store would not fit me, so I immediately eliminate them from consideration.
2. Wrong style. I am less fad conscious today than I was several decades ago, but there are some styles that just do not suit me: scratch them off the list.
3. Uncomfortable. Perhaps when I was younger, I would have put up with an uncomfortable shoe for style’s sake, but not anymore.
4. Unsafe. If the sole is slippery or the toe gets stubbed, I do not want it.
5. High maintenance. My shoe polishing days are over.
6. Not water resistant. It rains often enough for me to worry about this.
STORES: Whenever I need to purchase something retail, be it groceries or household items, I consider which stores are on my list of possibles. There are more stores that don’t make the list than do. Notice that some have more than one problem, but really, all it takes is one to get off the list.
1. Location. Some stores are too far away, and just not worth the drive, even for an expected savings on price. (Sorry, Safeway, you’re not close enough).
2. Too expensive. Some stores have earned a reputation of charging too much on too many items. I just don’t go to those places anymore. (Sorry, Albertsons, Ralphs, Vons.)
3. Waiting in line. Some stores are associated with long lines (Sorry, Stater Brothers).
4. Cannot find what I need, get in and get out quickly. (Sorry, again Stater Brothers, but since you remodeled, I cannot find anything.)
5. Limited selection. (Sorry, Trader Joe’s, I’m not coming for one clever thing at a great price.)
6. Won’t take credit cards.
7. Demand a special club card. That makes it more trouble than it’s worth.
8. Parking hassles.
9. Obnoxious other customers. (Sorry, again, Stater Brothers, the fussy kid capital).
SUV: I have about a dozen vehicles, and none of them is an SUV, and I probably won’t purchase one in the foreseeable future. Here are the rejection factors I perceive.
1. Risk of roll over. They might start making them safer.
2. The alternative is still affordable. I don’t have one car that will do everything an SUV will do, but I can still afford other cars: a sports car, a truck, a luxury sedan, that can do everything an SUV can do, only better. When the problems with maintaining so many cars becomes too great, then an SUV might look better.
TIME SHARE: I have been to a couple of their obnoxious presentations and that was enough to convince me that they were not a good investment.
1. Most firms in the business seem disreputable. If the deal is so good for the customer, why do they want to force you to sign now? Maybe because the more you think about it, the more obvious are the unfavourable.
2. The alternatives look better. Hotels turn out to be a lot cheaper and give more flexibility. Buying a vacation home is a better investment. Owning a time share gives you the financial responsibilities of a home, with the time limited private space of a hotel room.
WRISTWATCH: I do need to tell time, but I have a Rolex at home I never wear (and wish I had never purchased it).
1. Fear of breaking it.
2. Fear of losing it.
3. Fear of getting it stolen. I am even afraid that the Rolex will attract a robber who would otherwise have left me alone.
4. Fear of getting it wet.
5. Wrong style for my clothes.
6. Cannot see the time. The hands and numbers are hard to see
7. Does not have the features I want (alarm, etc.)
So, it stays home in a safe place, and I am not going to purchase another.

Decision making is not an event, with a beginning and a conclusion, but an ongoing process. It never really ends. It achieves some working points that serve as the foundation for action, but it is never really over. According to Payne, Bettman, and Johnson, authors of The Adaptive Decision Maker, people are constantly modifying their criteria considering past decisions and present realities. The process continues not just because new facts and alternatives present themselves, but because the priorities of consumers keep shifting.
If you have a business and wonder why your product “lost” the competition, well, it never really lost, it was just eliminated from the contest because of the rejection factors. It got disqualified by the potential customers’ rules. The good news is that there is usually another contest tomorrow, perhaps with the same customer and his revised unfavourable list, or with a new generation of customers with different priorities. Apple Computer lost out in the home computer segment, but came back with new products (e.g., pod, phone, pad). Its computers started looking better when they started using Intel Chips that could run Windows. Even Bank of America, and America Online, rejected by millions of former customers, have not completely lost. Some of their former customers may come back and give the redefined company another looks (but of course some stalwarts of bad customer service will probably go broke before enough of the former customers come back.)
Perhaps you think that consumers are foolish for being guided by the unfavourable, even to the point of becoming excessively fearful or risk averse. Your task in developing a product is not to criticize consumer thinking, but to understand it and use it.
The rejection mindset of consumers has been attributed to various factors. Psychologist Julie K. Norem in The Positive Power of Negative Thinking looked at pessimism, obsessive worry, lowered expectations, even the prevalence of the Murphy’s Law delusion as psychological defence mechanisms. Clearly, people are risk averse, and many risks are given exaggerated importance.
Dramatic risks are exaggerated, as in the case of parents who fear that children will find guns and start playing with them. More children are killed each year when left unattended with swimming pools than with guns.
Overall, however, using perceptions of the unfavourable to satisfice is quite consistent with mental health. Barry Schwartz in The Paradox of Choice: why more is less noted that the alternative to satisficing is to constantly attempt to maximize and be unsatisfied with any product or service that is not perfect on all accounts. This leads to dissatisfaction. “The drawbacks of maximizing are so profound, and the benefits so tenuous that we may well ask why anyone would pursue such a strategy.” To be less depressed, embrace satisficing.
Another distorted perception on present choices would be the past. Those things carrying the most weight are not part experiences, but previous decisions. It is the latter, more so than the former, that frame the present decisions with excess baggage. People do not want to admit that they were wrong in the past, and therefore tend to perpetuate previous decisions, wise or not. People might follow a losing stock until the company is bankrupt because they don’t want to admit that they were wrong not to sell previously (or admit that they were wrong to buy it in the first place).
The process of decision making never ends, but people do get tired of the process and want to call a temporary halt. When the customer says that he needs to think it over, he just needs some time to stop thinking. He has pretty much excluded your product, or at least finds that its further consideration is bothersome. You could ask him just what is it that he needs to think over, but that would presume that he is going to use the near future to gather relevant information (which he is not). In certain contexts “I’ll wait” or “Let me think about it” or “I’ll be back” is but a social courtesy, a euphemism for “No, and I don’t want to stay here and argue about it.” In other contexts, the customer leaves with a sincere intention to give the product further consideration, but a failure of memory or other unforeseen future factors prevent the purchase.
Now when the young entrepreneur knows how 95% of people will think of his company and products it will create be it located in Argentina, Laos, Beijing or New York, my advice is successful selling is leading the customers to where they want to go, to the solution of problems, not manipulating them out of their hard-earned money. The best sales “pitch” should be a series of pain avoiding steps.
Besides if you do have any questions give me a call: https://clarity.fm/joy-brotonath