Customers loved it. They just didn't know it existed.
When I was Head of Brand at a D2C car leasing company, our maintenance add-on was stuck at 8% of orders. Everyone had a theory about why. Nobody had asked the customers.
It was a genuinely good deal, so nobody could work out why customers weren't snapping our hands off. The assumption internally was that people just didn't want it. Price sensitivity, maybe, or maintenance simply wasn't a priority.
I didn't buy it. So I brought in a research agency, sat in on the interviews, and listened to what customers actually said.
The theories didn't survive the interviews
People just don't want it
They loved it. The servicing, the glass repair, the VIP treatment at Kwik Fit with no paperwork.
It's a price thing
They were willing to pay once they understood what was included.
Maintenance isn't a priority
They had no idea it existed. We'd buried it in checkout copy written in car industry language, not theirs.
The product wasn't the problem. The way we talked about it was. So I took the findings back to the business, made the case, and we rewrote the description in our customers' words, with the features they'd told us they loved right at the front.
8% to 14%.
That's the attachment rate. Before, 8% of customers added maintenance to their lease. After we rewrote it, 14% did.
That's the thing about customer insight. Sometimes it doesn't tell you to change the product. It tells you to change how you talk about it. And sometimes that's worth more.
Got a client whose best feature is hiding?
I work white-label for agencies, so the insight turns up in your work, under your name.
