Every marketer knows this feeling:
A competitor launches a new landing page, then two weeks later, another competitor launches a similar one. Then three more join in on the “trend”.
Suddenly, every headline in your market says the same thing, all your competitors make the same promise, highlight similar offers and talk more or less align all of their pricing. Before long, someone drops a few screenshots into Slack and asks the question that starts countless bad optimization decisions: “Shouldn’t we be doing this too?”
On the surface, following the market feels safe.
If everyone is leading with price, price must be what customers care about. If every competitor is highlighting discounts, surely that’s what drives conversions.
But here’s the issue: Your competitors aren’t your customers.
The visible messaging on a landing page tells you what a company decided to say, it tells you nothing about whether that message is actually working, what research informed it, or what their buyers truly care about.
That’s how entire industries end up trapped in the same cycle: everyone copies everyone else until every company sounds identical and prospects can’t tell them apart.
That’s exactly what was happening in our client’s market.
This case study is about what happened when we decided not to follow that cycle and instead of joining a “no-body wins” race to the bottom on price, did something that goes against what most advice… we went back to our original customer research, and did more of it.
We analyzed surveys, interviews, reviews, Reddit discussions, and social conversations to understand what buyers actually needed before they were ready to convert and what we discovered challenged the assumptions that were driving the entire market.
This process led to a series of landing page experiments that increased conversions without competing on price.
Table of Contents
When the entire market zigs (and our client’s did)
Our client is one of the largest moving companies in the U.S.
They’ve been doing this for nearly 100 years, serving millions of customers across the world and they care deeply about their customers.
Over the past twelve months, there was a noticeable shift in the market. Competitor after competitor started leading with price. Their messaging led with the cheapest deal and best quote language. “Contact us today for a bonus.” “No hidden fees.” On the surface this made sense: The market was tightening, the economy felt uncertain, and moving is expensive. People are worried about money, so you need to talk about money.
I get it, when you watch every competitor in your space move in the same direction, there’s a gravitational pull to follow. Internal pressure builds fast, someone on your team screenshots three competitor pages and drops them in Slack, your VP says, “We need to do this!” By the end of the week, the instinct is to rewrite your headline to match (especially when you don’t have a clear reason to do something different).
This is where the problem begins: You don’t have your own research telling you what your specific customers care about, and without the foundation of your own deep customer research, every competitor move feels like a mandate to follow.
Research backs this up: 86% of B2B buyers see no real difference between suppliers.
That number was measured in B2B, but the dynamic is identical in any competitive market. When everyone says the same thing, prospects stop seeing meaningful differences.
The moving industry was heading straight into that trap, so we had a choice: Follow the market into a price war we didn’t need to win, OR go back to the research and find out what our client’s customers really cared about.
We chose the research.
Trust is the new conversion rate (and it beats price).
We went back to everything we had: Customer surveys, visitor surveys and interviews, but we didn’t stop there. We went deep on ‘Social Listening’, reading Reddit threads about moving nightmares (and there were some BAD ones). Going through Facebook groups where people asked for recommendations and warnings, LinkedIn conversations, Quora questions and in this client’s case, one source that turned out to be a goldmine: reviews on the Better Business Bureau website.
Surveys and interviews tell you a lot, but Batman-level insights come from what people say when they don’t know you’re listening.
Our research revealed the same story over and over again. Pricing mattered, but not in the way that competitor messaging would suggest. What we found was far more about trust, than it was about a cheap moving quote.
Our client’s customers talked about white-glove services, items arriving safely, movers who were polite, friendly and people they trusted having in their home. They talked about knowing someone would pick up the phone if something went wrong, about sitting in their new house and feeling relieved that everything made it in one piece. People wanted to understand what happens if the move takes longer than expected, is there a cap? How would that be communicated? The fear wasn’t just about damage, it was about losing control of the process entirely.
And these aren’t small, niche communities. Groups like this Chicago relocation forum have 35,000+ members posting 60+ times a day. And there are tons of posts asking the same kinds of questions: which company can I trust, what should I watch out for, who do I avoid?
For example, this is just one of many posts we found in Facebook groups related to moving:
And even more insights like this one from subreddits like r/moving:
and this one:
Multiple customers said they never thought they’d hire someone to unpack their home because it felt like a luxury they didn’t need. But after experiencing the full white-glove service, they said they’d never do it the old way again. They knew that without it, they’d still have unpacked boxes sitting in the corner seven months later.
These insights weren’t outliers, there was a clear pattern across hundreds of responses (the kind you don’t get from simply analyzing a competitor’s landing page).
Price was in there of course, but for this client’s ideal customers, price came after trust. They needed to know their grandmother’s china would arrive safe, that an actual person (a brick-and-mortar company with a building) stood behind the service, and that a person would answer the phone if something went sideways. Only then did they want to talk numbers.
Which meant that no amount of “cheapest rates guaranteed” messaging was going to address the thing that mattered most to their ideal customers.
What the research gave us was a Customer Compass: A clear picture of what prospects feared most, what outcomes they desired, and the exact language they used to describe both. Every decision we made after this point, the headline, the page structure, the proof points we chose, traced back to what we found in this step. This is why step 1 of the Emotional Targeting Framework™ is always research.
Without it, we would have done what every competitor was doing. Talked about price, hoped for the best, and never known why it wasn’t working.
With it, we had the confidence to do something that looked risky from the outside but felt inevitable once you’d read the research.
So what do we end up doing? We went premium in a market racing to be cheap.
The Emotional Targeting Audit
Once we had the research, we held the existing landing pages up against it using the Emotional Targeting Audit.
We ask nine reflective questions designed to answer one thing: Does this page reflect what we know about our customer’s buying decision?
Emotional Targeting Audit Questions:
- Can my customers see their pains reflected on this page? (i.e. is it focused on their problems or does it focus on the product too heavily without relating it to the customer’s needs?)
- Can my customers immediately (and clearly) see what’s in it for them on this page?
- Am I using the words my customers and prospects use to describe their pains or challenges?
- Will my customers feel seen when they read this page? (Am I addressing what matters to them?)
- Am I using stories that resonate?
- Am I just speaking about the features and how your solution works? Or am I highlighting the outcomes customers care about?
- Can a prospect immediately see WHAT action they need to take on the page and WHAT emotional outcome they will get?
- Am I using relevant social proof that directly dismantles their top 3 concerns/hesitations? Or is my social proof generic?
- Does the page use easy-to-follow design cues? (Is the use of color in CTAs and highlighted elements consistent?)
Though the existing landing pages addressed the hidden fees objection, they didn’t reflect the deeper fear the research had uncovered. That’s what told us the test needed to rebuild the page around a completely different emotional angle.
The experiment: Premium vs. price
The control was converting at a good pace. The headline said:
“Pay what you see. No hidden fees. Get a free moving quote right now.”
It addressed one of the concerns we saw in our research, people don’t want surprise charges on moving day. However, it was answering the surface question while ignoring the deeper one.
The new variation led with something different entirely: “A premium moving experience from start to finish.”
To make prospects feel like their move was in safe, experienced hands, we added bullet points that focused on what they cared about:
- Full value protection for every item
- 24/7 customer support to handle any challenge
- Nearly 100 years of service across the country for millions of customers
- Full-service or customizable options – you choose how much help you want
- Fragile item packing
- Complete assembly and disassembly
- End-to-end loading and unloading by their team of experts
We didn’t ignore the price, we still addressed cost transparency but pricing wasn’t the headline, it wasn’t the hero.
The difference between these two pages was a fundamentally different answer to the question “what does this prospect need to feel before they’ll convert?”
- The control focused on promising a fair price and not getting ripped off,
- The variation focused on the bigger promise: “your entire life, and everything you own, is in good hands.”
The result was a 14% increase in conversions.
Once we saw the results, the marketing team extended that message into emails, across the website, social posts, reddit strategy, Paid ads creative and into every channel they could because when research tells you what your customers care about most, that insight doesn’t belong on one page, it belongs everywhere.
Running tests with Emotional Targeting
The type of experiment we ran is what I call ‘Pains vs. desired outcomes’ experiment. It’s one of the emotion-based tests I break down in my book Emotional Targeting: Win hearts. Boost sales. Own the market’ .
The control spoke to an objection (fear of hidden fees). The new variation spoke to a desired outcome (the feeling of confidence, safety, and trust during one of the most stressful experiences in a person’s life).
A tactical test changes a button color or moves a form field, a strategic test asks “do our prospects respond more to us solving challenge x, or concern y ?” and then designs two fundamentally different experiences to find out.
3 rules for optimizing your customer journey with emotion
1. The obvious objection is rarely the most important one
Price was a concern for this client’s prospects but when we dug into the research, price wasn’t the thing that kept people up at night. Trust and safety were. Safety was.
Most pages stop at the first objection because it’s the easiest one to address and the most obvious one (it’s right there on the surface). But the fears and desires that drive buying decisions sit underneath, and the only way to reach them is through research. (Not assumptions or competitor analysis). Research.
Go through your reviews (yours and your competitors’). Check Reddit, Facebook groups, Quora, discord… and ask yourself: what is the biggest concern people have before hiring someone like you? Not the first thing that comes to mind. The emotional fear underneath it. That’s where your messaging should start.
Listen to the places where your prospects talk when they’re not talking to you.
2. Standing out doesn’t mean being louder
Though all competitors in the market were focused intensely on pricing, (and seemed like they were getting louder, bolder, and more aggressive in their messaging), and the instinct was to match that volume (or try to out-shout them with more spend behind ads), we didn’t.
The premium messaging we created resonated because it reflected what prospects said in their own words (across multiple research touch points):
- “I want to know my things are safe.”
- “I want someone I can trust.”
- “I want to sit in my new home and know everything arrived.”
There’s a difference between messaging that’s loud and messaging that lands.
Loud is a volume game. It gets attention but doesn’t hold it. Landing means your prospects read your page and think “these people get it, they understand what I’m going through.” That feeling (being seen) is what creates conversions (not a bigger font or a flashier offer).
The research makes this point too: B2B buyers who perceive personal value – things like confidence in their choice, reduced risk, career advancement – are 8x more likely to pay a premium than those who only see business value. That was measured in B2B, but the principle is universal. When people feel like you understand what matters to them personally, price becomes secondary.
Your competitors can outspend you. They can’t out-understand your customers IF you’ve done the research.
3. A meaningful A/B test optimizes for clarity and emotional resonance, not the button
This experiment wasn’t about moving the CTA from the left side to the right, swapping the hero image or changing the button color from light orange to a darker one. This test asked a strategic question: Do our prospects respond more to us addressing their surface objection (price transparency) or reflecting their deeper emotional need (trust, safety, confidence)? We tested two different emotional angles.
Most of us are stuck on the deadly hamster wheel of optimization. The wheel that includes testing a lot of random elements, hoping something will stick, copying competitors and never knowing why a win happened or how to replicate it.
Strategic testing starts with a hypothesis rooted in research. “Do our customers care more about X than Y? Let’s find out.” The result of strategic testing should never just tell you which page won. It should tell you something about your customer that you can apply to your emails and ads. Basically, your entire customer journey.
The most expensive bet is the one without research
The risky move wasn’t actually leading with premium when every competitor led with price (I mean sure, it felt risky at first… and it probably even looked risky from the outside), because it was backed by a lot of meaningful data and insights that all pointed in the same direction.
The risky move was the one so many make every day without realizing it. They follow the market because they don’t have their own research telling them not to. That is one of the most expensive bets you can make because when it doesn’t work, you have no idea why, and when it does work, you have no idea how to replicate it.
Research turns “I think our customers care about this” into “I know they do. Here’s the data.” (Which is powerful when you need to show proof to the C-suite and ownership.) It gives you the confidence to go against the market when the market is wrong. And it’s what makes every test, page, every email smarter than the last one because you’re building on customer-first insights, instead of immeasurable instinct.
If you want to understand how to build that research foundation – the full methodology behind what we did for this client and dozens of others – it’s all in Emotional Targeting: Win Hearts. Boost Sales. Own Your Market. Or if you want to see what this looks like applied to your business, that’s what our Emotional Targeting Audits are built to do.
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