I was talking with a friend tonight about the art of sales and said (realized?) that there are two distinct audiences for any product.

First, there are consumers, who need something and look for someone else to help meet that need. They head to the grocery store for a banana, or they buy a pair of shoes at Aldo. Consumers tend to look for the best way to satisfy their need and the the moment of product use ends the transaction.

Second are collectors. When a collector wants a banana they head to Whole Foods or a local market because they don’t just want a banana, but a lady fingers banana. Or perhaps they buy a cuban banana tree. Collectors want to consume, but their main end is the width of experience related to their consumption. When a collector uses a good that transaction is only at its midpoint.

Neither is inherently better. In fact, nearly everyone would fall into both categories at some point depending on what they were looking for. Travel, with it’s higher costs, tends to make collectors out of most of us. Beans or pasta or rice are more likely to establish consumers. But there are people who collect pasta experiences, hence the 4000 Pappardelle’s farmer’s market stands in the US.

So the question is, anytime you’re thinking of selling anything, are you aiming for the consumers or aiming for the collectors? If you put the produce section from a Whole Foods in a Walmart there’s going to be transactional friction. A Walmart shopper is looking to consume a banana, not collect a new banana experience. So multiple types of banana just creates confusion without reward. Why are there multiple types of bananas and why are their prices different? Which one am I supposed to buy? Ultimately the problem is that the consumer is thinking, “I just want a banana.”

Put that Walmart’s produce section in Whole Foods and you’ll have a problem of the same scale. The Whole Foods shopper may look around and wonder where all the bananas are. The lack of variety – the lack of collectable experience that can make that consumption live on in story and comparative experience – makes the Walmart selection worthless.

Again, neither is the better experience. But the distinction drives why  people shop where and how they do. It probably also explains some of the disdain people have for how and where others shop.