Stop Ignoring the User Looking Across the Chain of Buyers

Are you trying to sell your product to the person who signs the check, the person who actually uses it, or the person who recommends it to their boss? Most companies follow industry tradition and focus all their marketing energy on a single target, but they're often chasing the wrong person entirely. The chain of buyers is a framework that identifies three distinct groups involved in every transaction: the purchasers who pay, the users who interact with the product, and the influencers who provide guidance. By shifting focus from the traditional target to a neglected member of this chain, businesses can find uncontested market space and leave competitors behind.

In many industries, competitive convergence happens because every player defines the "customer" the same way. If you sell office equipment, you likely target the purchasing department because they manage the budget. If you're a pharmaceutical giant, you target doctors because they write the prescriptions. This collective tunnel vision creates a red ocean where everyone fights for the same person’s attention while ignoring the needs of everyone else involved in the product's life cycle. Shifting your gaze across the chain allows you to see pain points your rivals aren't even looking at yet.

Why Strategy Often Targets the Wrong Link in the Chain of Buyers

This concept comes from W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne in their groundbreaking book, Blue Ocean Strategy. They argue that an industry typically converges on a single buyer group, often for reasons that are more about habit than actual logic. The authors’ research into 108 business launches found that while 86% were simple line extensions, the 14% that created blue oceans generated 61% of total profits. Identifying a new target in the chain is one of the most effective ways to achieve those results.

When a company questions the industry's conventional definition of who the buyer is, they find new ways to offer value. A purchasing agent might care about the lowest price, but the actual user probably cares more about how easy the software is to navigate. If you satisfy the user, they'll often pressure the purchaser to switch to your brand regardless of the price tag. This shift in customer targeting strategy turns a commodity product into a must-have tool.

Choosing Between Purchaser vs User vs Influencer Roles

To move beyond the competition, you have to break the chain into its core components. Each group has different priorities, and the most successful companies know which priorities to ignore and which to champion. This requires a deep dive into the motivations of the three specific links.

Why Most Companies Target the Wrong Link in the Chain of Buyers

The purchaser is the person who actually pays for the product. In the business-to-business world, this is usually a procurement officer or a finance manager. Their world is defined by budgets, cost-benefit analyses, and standardized systems. While they’re important, focusing solely on them usually leads to a price war because they often view products as interchangeable commodities. If you're only talking to the person holding the wallet, you're competing on price rather than value.

Solving Problems for the Actual User

The user is the person who lives with the product every day. In the computer industry, this is the employee typing on the keyboard; in healthcare, it's the patient taking the medicine. Users don't care about corporate procurement budgets as much as they care about their own productivity and comfort. When companies shift their focus to the user, they often find massive "pain points" that the industry has ignored. Solving these problems creates intense brand loyalty that purchasers find difficult to ignore.

Influencing the Influencer

Influencers don't always pay for or use the product, but their opinion carries the weight of authority. Architects influence building material sales, and doctors influence which insulin a diabetic uses. Most pharmaceutical companies focus 100% of their sales efforts on these influencers. However, if a company can provide a solution that makes the influencer's job easier while simultaneously delighting the user, they can effectively lock out the competition. Statistics show that in industries like diabetes care, shifting this focus has helped leaders like Novo Nordisk maintain nearly 70% of their turnover from innovative delivery systems.

How Novo Nordisk and Bloomberg Flipped the Script

Novo Nordisk provides the perfect example of a successful shift across the chain of buyers. For decades, the insulin industry focused entirely on doctors (the influencers). Every company competed to produce purer and purer insulin because that's what doctors requested. But by the early 1980s, insulin was already so pure that further improvements offered almost no real benefit to the patient. Novo Nordisk saw that patients (the users) struggled with the complexity of syringes and vials, which felt medicinal and embarrassing in public.

They launched the NovoPen, a user-friendly delivery system that looked like a fountain pen. It contained a week's worth of insulin and allowed for easy, discreet dosing. By focusing on the user’s need for convenience rather than the influencer’s obsession with purity, Novo Nordisk turned a commodity drug into a premium lifestyle product. This move didn't just win over patients; it forced doctors to prescribe the pen because patients demanded it. The company successfully bypassed the traditional battleground of the influencer.

Bloomberg followed a similar path in the financial information industry. Before they arrived, companies like Reuters and Telerate sold to IT managers (the purchasers). IT managers wanted standardized systems that were easy for their departments to maintain. Bloomberg ignored the IT managers and focused on the traders and analysts (the users). They built terminals with specialized keyboards and built-in analytics that saved traders hours of manual calculation. Traders then pressured their firms to buy Bloomberg terminals because the machines made them more profitable, effectively taking the decision out of the IT department’s hands.

Three Steps to Target the Right Customer

You don't need a massive research budget to start looking across the chain. It’s about changing your perspective on the people you already interact with. Follow these three steps to identify where your industry is currently blind.

1. Map out every person involved in the life cycle of your product. Don't just list the person who pays; list the person who maintains it, the person who uses it daily, and the person whose reputation is on the line if it fails. If you are in a B2B space, this usually involves at least four different roles across three departments.

2. Interview the neglected members of that chain to find their biggest frustration. Ask the user what they hate about the current industry standard, or ask the maintenance crew why your competitor's product is a nightmare to fix. You’re looking for the "pain points" that aren't mentioned in your current sales brochures because they don't matter to the person who currently signs the check.

3. Design a feature that specifically solves that frustration and make it your primary marketing message. If you find that users hate the setup time of your product, make "ready in 30 seconds" your core promise. When you solve a problem for the user, you create a champion inside your customer's organization who will do the selling for you.

Where This Concept Hits a Wall

While shifting your focus can be powerful, it isn't a magic bullet for every situation. Critics often point out that ignoring the purchaser can lead to a "feature creep" that makes products too expensive for the market to bear. If you build a perfect tool for the user but it costs five times more than the industry standard, the purchaser will still block the sale regardless of how much the user loves it. You must still hit a strategic price point that is accessible to the mass of buyers.

Additionally, some highly regulated industries make it almost impossible to bypass certain influencers. In enterprise cybersecurity, for example, a user might want a simpler interface, but the Chief Information Security Officer (the influencer) cannot compromise on complex security protocols. Shifting to the user in this scenario could actually lead to a product that is perceived as dangerous or unprofessional. You have to ensure that satisfying one link in the chain doesn't create a deal-breaking problem for another.

Shifting your focus from the traditional purchaser to the user or influencer allows you to see the market through a new lens. It's often the quickest way to turn a stagnant product into a market leader. Start by identifying one major frustration of your actual end-user and redesign your offering to eliminate it. Focus your next sales presentation on how you solve that specific user problem to build internal advocates.