Ask most founders why people buy products and you get a list of features. Ask a buyer and you get a story about who they are.
That gap is the most expensive thing in ecommerce, and it decides what you are allowed to charge. Here is the story that proves it.
The $450 Garden Chair
There is a story doing the rounds about a plastic garden chair. You know the one. Four quid from your local shop, ugly as hell, and the only joy you ever got out of it was stacking a load of them up as a kid and sitting on top of the pile.
A furniture startup buys thousands of them from a factory, splits the shipment in two, and runs two launches.
Batch one goes to an old school growth marketer. Clean Shopify store, Facebook ads, "durable, stackable, $19.99." He barely breaks even. The internet is already drowning in plastic chairs.
Batch two goes to a 22 year old creative director. She doesn't run a single ad. She blowtorches the underside of each backrest, laser etches a number into the back, 014 of 500, and posts 50 of them to underground music icons with a note that reads: "This belongs in a gallery, not a backyard. Keep it or burn it."
Then nothing happens. For three weeks the chairs just sit there.
Until a legendary musician posts his to Instagram. One photo, the chair sat in the middle of a bare, minimalist living room, no caption explaining it.
Overnight, every single chair sold out at $450 a pop.
Now the part that actually matters.
None of it happened. The video that told it, from TikTok account @attentioncompound, invented the whole thing and admitted it at the end.
I'm not sharing it because it's true. I'm sharing it because for a brief moment while you were reading it, you believed it.
You Believed It Because You Have Watched It Happen
Supreme sold a branded house brick and people resold it for hundreds.
Stanley sold a flask your dad already owned in 1997 and turned it into a queue outside Target.
Birkenstocks were orthopaedic sandals for gardeners. Now they are fashion.
Same object. Same materials. Same factory, in some cases. Different world attached to it.
So when someone tells you a plastic chair went for $450 because the right person put it in the right living room, no part of your brain files it as impossible. That reaction is the data point.
Why People Buy Products: The Avatar Gap
People do not buy what a product does. They buy what owning it says about them.
The avatar gap is the distance between who someone is and who they have decided they are. Products close that gap. That is the whole job.
Your customer has already cast themselves in a role. The disciplined one. The one with taste. The one who reads the label. The one who does not buy rubbish. Every purchase is either a step towards that character or a step away from it.
Sell the step towards it, and price stops being the argument.
The Jogger Test
Say you have decided you are a runner. Not a professional. You go out three mornings a week and you have quietly built that into who you are.
Now you start noticing what everyone else has on their feet. Right now it is Hokas on the easy runs, and anyone chasing a personal best is in Nike Vaporflys. Walk round any parkrun on a Saturday morning and you will see the same two shoes on repeat.
Here is what happens next, and it happens without your permission.
You start wanting them.
Not because you tested them. Not because someone sold you on the foam, the plate, or the heel drop. You want them because runners have them, and you have decided you are a runner. At that point the shoe is not footwear. It is evidence.
And look at what people will overlook to get that evidence. Hokas landed looking like orthopaedic clown shoes. Everyone said so. They are now the default trainer for half the running world, because looking like a runner beat looking good, and it was not close.
That is the giveaway. Taste bends to identity, not the other way round.
It is the same reason every ecom guru on your timeline travels with a Rimowa, carries a Goyard, and wears a Rolex. Not one of them sat down and compared suitcase warranties. The luggage is a receipt. It proves membership of the group they have decided they belong to, and it does the proving before they have said a word.
This Is the Difference Between Selling and Discounting
Founders hear "identity" and file it under brand. The fluffy bit. Something you get to once the real work is done.
It is the opposite. It is the thing deciding what you can charge.
If you are a commodity, price is the only conversation you are allowed to have. So you discount. Then you discount harder to beat the last one. Your customers learn to wait for the sale, and you spend the rest of the year selling a good product for less than it is worth.
Run that through the Profit Formula maths and you can see the damage. Discounting cuts your margin, and breakeven ROAS is 1 divided by your margin. Drop a 40% margin to 30% and your breakeven ROAS climbs from 2.5 to 3.3. Same product, same ads, but now every campaign has to work a third harder just to stand still.
If you own a world, that conversation never starts. Nobody haggles over the thing that proves who they are. Same product, same factory, two completely different businesses.
And the gap is widening. AI clones your software in a weekend. A factory copies your product in a fortnight. Anything that can be replicated will be, and fast. The world you built around the product is the only part nobody can lift.
Generic creation is now a commodity. Taste is not.
How to Build the World Around Your Product
Taste sounds like something you either have or you do not. It is not. It is a set of decisions made publicly and repeatedly until people can predict you. Three things build it, and none of them need a bigger budget.
- A point of view. An actual opinion that costs you something. Not "quality matters." Something a chunk of your market will disagree with. If nobody can disagree with your positioning, nobody can belong to it either.
- A named enemy. Not a competitor by name. The thing you are against. The shortcut the category takes, the ingredient everyone hides, the reason the incumbent charges what it charges. People bond over a shared enemy faster than a shared love.
- A standard you repeat until it is boring. Boring to you is barely registered by them. Same world, same rules, same aesthetic, over and over, until seeing it once tells someone exactly what buying it would say about them.
Do that at a world-class level and the ad stops being an ad. It becomes a door.
The Uncomfortable Bit
This does not rescue a bad product.
A world built around something that disappoints people just makes the disappointment travel faster. Identity buying raises the stakes both ways. If the product does not hold up, you have not sold someone a costume, you have embarrassed them in front of their own self-image, and that is the one thing nobody forgives.
So fix the offer first. Always.
Then stop writing ads that explain what your product does to people who already know what it does. Show them who they get to be.
If you are running a Shopify store doing $50k a month or more and your only lever left is discounting, the problem is not your media buying. It is that nobody knows who your product makes them. Book a free profit audit and we will show you the real numbers underneath it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do people buy products they do not need?
Because the purchase closes the gap between who they are and who they have decided they are. A product is evidence of an identity, not just a set of features. That is why someone who identifies as a runner wants the trainers other runners wear, even when they dislike how they look.
What is the avatar gap?
The avatar gap is the distance between who a customer is and who they have decided they are. Products close that gap. Marketing that sells the step towards the customer's chosen identity converts better than marketing that lists features, because the customer is buying proof of the character they are already playing.
Do people buy for status or for value?
Both, but status decides the ceiling. Value gets a product considered. What the purchase says about the buyer decides what they will pay for it. Two products with identical costs can sell at wildly different prices when one belongs to a world people want to be seen inside.
How does brand identity affect ad performance?
It sets the price you can hold, and price sets your margin. Breakeven ROAS is 1 divided by your profit margin, so a brand forced into discounting raises the bar every campaign has to clear. Identity work is not separate from media buying. It decides the number your media buying has to beat.
How do you build a brand people want to belong to?
Three things. A point of view that a chunk of your market will disagree with, a named enemy that is a real practice rather than a competitor, and one standard repeated until it is boring to you. Consistency is what turns a set of opinions into something recognisable enough to join.