The Three Wallets in a Brain

Every consumer in B2C has two wallets in their brain: the “I want it” wallet and the “I need it” wallet. What they spend on comes down to which of the two makes sense. If you have a want product, you're trying to convince people it's a need. If you have a need product, a lot of the time you want to convince them it's a want. That's two directions of communication.

B2B gets way more complicated, because B2B has a third wallet. Call it “suit.” Want, need and suit. Does this suit the company? Does it suit where we are right now, where we're going, where we're coming from? Does it suit the positive future we want? Does it suit the negative present we're in?

That doesn't increase your options by 50%, going from two to three. It triples them. You still have want to need and need to want, but now also want to suit, suit to want, need to suit and suit to need. Way more variables. It's not more opportunity. It's just way more complex.

We're different people as buyers depending on context. At work we don't make purchase, research or vendor decisions the way we do two minutes after we walk out of the office, get in the car and listen to an ad, or scroll on our phone at lunch. A consumer buying for their family and a consumer buying for a company are very different, and you have way more to keep in mind.

There's a two-wallet consumer and a three-wallet consumer. With three, there are way more directions things can go.