Jansie, who started Stoei, bought a pair of headphones a while back. Nothing fancy. An inexpensive pair from a well-known brand, the kind you pick up without much research because the price is low enough not to worry about.
They turned out to be fantastic. Clear sound, comfortable, a battery that lasts. It had been a long time since he’d been that happy with a pair of headphones, and certainly not at that price. He told people about them. He’d have bought the brand again without a second thought.
That’s the dream, isn’t it? A customer who is pleasantly surprised, stays loyal, and tells their friends. Most businesses would give a lot for that.
And then the brand started getting in its own way.
This article is about what happened next, why it happens to good businesses far more often than you’d think, and how to check that your own website isn’t quietly doing the same thing to your customers.
You bought it because it was good at one thing
Every customer chooses you for a reason. Usually it’s one or two simple ones, even if your business does dozens of things.
For these headphones, the reason was plain: great sound for the money. That’s it. That’s the whole story a happy customer would tell.
The headphones came with a free app for his phone. The app made sense. It let him adjust the sound, check the battery and update the headphones. Every part of it helped with the one thing he’d bought them for. It was a tool, and a good one, and he didn’t think about it much. Which is exactly how a good tool should feel.
Hold on to that idea, because it’s the heart of this whole article. Your customers have a reason for choosing you. Everything you do either supports that reason or gets in its way.
Then an update added something nobody asked for
About a year ago, the app updated. And alongside the sound settings, there was now an AI chat assistant.
His first reaction was puzzlement. What would he chat with it about? He’d opened the app to change the sound or check the battery. He didn’t need a conversation. He couldn’t think of a single question about his headphones that a chat assistant would answer better than the simple settings screen already did.
There’s nothing wrong with AI as such. It’s useful for plenty of things. The problem was that this feature had no connection to the reason he’d bought the product. It wasn’t better sound. It wasn’t longer battery life. It wasn’t easier controls. It was something else entirely, bolted onto an app that existed to help with headphones.
From the outside, it looked like a company that had decided it needed to “do AI” and went looking for somewhere to put it.
And then it started asking for attention
If the chat assistant had simply sat quietly in a corner of the app, he’d probably have ignored it and moved on.
But it didn’t sit quietly. The app started sending notifications to his phone, nudging him to try the AI.
That’s a small thing, but it’s worth noticing what changed. Before, the app served him: he opened it when he wanted something. Now the app wanted something from him. His phone was buzzing with a message that had nothing to do with listening to music, from a company he’d previously only thought well of.
Every unwanted notification is a tiny withdrawal from the goodwill a business has built. One is easy to shrug off. A steady drip of them starts to change how you feel about the people sending them.
But there was no way to say no thanks
So he did what any reasonable customer would do. He contacted the company and asked how to turn the AI off.
The answer: there was no way to opt out.
That’s the moment the story turns. Up to then, the AI was puzzling and the notifications were annoying. But being told he couldn’t switch it off changed the feeling from “that’s odd” to “they’re not listening to me”. He’d asked, politely, for something simple, and the answer was no.
Nobody likes being made to accept something they didn’t ask for. It’s why we hate a salesperson who won’t take “just looking” for an answer, and why we avoid shops where someone follows us around. Being unable to say no doesn’t make people say yes. It makes them leave, or quietly resent staying.
He still likes the headphones. But he no longer tells the story about them the way he used to. Now the story comes with a “but”.
So the thing he loved got harder to see
Here’s what’s really going on, and it’s bigger than headphones.
The sound is still great. The product hasn’t got worse. But what the brand is saying to him has changed. It used to say “great sound for the money”. Now it says “we’d like you to use our AI, whether you want to or not”. The first message made him a fan. The second makes him wary.
This is what a muddled message looks like from the customer’s side. It isn’t usually a badly written slogan. It’s the sum of everything a business does and says. Each new thing you add, each notification you send, each pop-up you show, becomes part of what people think you’re about.
Add enough things that don’t fit, and the reason people chose you gets buried. It’s still there. It’s just harder to see.
It happens when nobody checks with the customer first
It’s easy to laugh at a big company for this, but it’s worth being fair. The same brand also sells earbuds that are built around AI features, such as translation, and for people who bought those, an assistant in the app may make perfect sense.
The mistake wasn’t building it. The mistake was pushing it on everyone, including people who had simply bought headphones to listen to things, and then refusing to let them opt out.
That kind of mistake almost always comes from skipping the same step: finding out what customers actually want before deciding what to do. Somewhere, someone decided the AI was important. It may well have been important to the business. But a quick look at why people buy inexpensive headphones would have shown it wasn’t important to most of them.
It’s the trap we wrote about in “Before you spend on ads, do the marketing“: the urge to act before you’ve done the groundwork. And it’s why “Do the marketing first, then let your website sell” starts with one plain rule. Find out before you decide. You are not your customer, and what excites you about your business isn’t always what matters to the people paying for it.
And your website can do exactly the same
You probably aren’t adding AI assistants to anyone’s headphones. But the same thing happens on small business websites all the time, and it happens for good reasons. You’re proud of what you do. You keep adding services. Someone tells you that every website needs a chat box, or a newsletter sign-up, or a pop-up offer. Each addition makes sense on its own.
Add them together, and the visitor arrives at something like this:
- A home page that lists everything. Twelve services, all given equal space, so nobody can tell what you’re best at.
- A pop-up before they’ve read a word. A newsletter box or special offer that covers the page before the visitor even knows who you are.
- A chat box nobody answers. It pops up saying “How can we help?”, and then nobody replies for two days.
- The new thing you’re excited about, front and center. A new service or product that’s taken over the top of the page, pushing aside the work most of your customers come to you for.
- Words that describe you, not them. Pages about your history, your values and your awards, with very little about the visitor’s problem.
None of these is a disaster on its own. Together, they do to your website what the AI assistant did to that app. They bury the reason people choose you under things they didn’t come for.
And often, nobody notices. The site looks busy and complete. It just doesn’t sell, and it’s hard to say why. We wrote about that in “Sometimes the website isn’t the problem“: a website can’t fix a message nobody can follow.
So check whether your website is getting in the way
The good news is that this is fixable, and you don’t need to start from scratch. Here’s a simple check you can do this week.
1. Write down why customers choose you. One or two reasons, in plain words. Not what you wish they’d say, but what you believe they actually say. If you’re not sure, that’s useful to know too.
2. Ask three customers to check your answer. Call or email three people who chose you recently. Ask one question: “Why did you choose us, rather than someone else?” Write down their exact words. Don’t be surprised if they differ from yours. That’s the whole point of asking.
3. Open your home page and compare. Look at the top of your home page, the part people see before they scroll. Does it say the reason your customers gave you? Or does it say something else, or try to say everything at once?
4. Look at what people actually use. If your website shows you which pages people visit, look at the list. The pages that get read are telling you what visitors care about. The ones nobody visits are worth questioning. If your site has a search box, read what people type into it: it’s your customers telling you, in their own words, what they came for. There’s more on that in “Your search box is market research you’re not reading“.
5. List everything that interrupts. Pop-ups, chat boxes, banners, sign-up forms, anything that appears before the visitor has asked for it. For each one, ask: does this help the visitor, or only us?
6. Remove, move or quiet what doesn’t serve them. You don’t have to delete everything. A newsletter sign-up can move to the bottom of the page instead of popping up. A chat box can be removed if nobody’s there to answer it. A dozen services can be grouped so your main one leads. The aim isn’t an empty website. It’s a website where the reason people choose you is the first thing they see.
And always give people a way to say no
If there’s one lesson to take from the headphones story, it’s this one. When you ask for someone’s attention, always let them say no thanks, easily.
On your website, that means a few simple habits:
- Pop-ups that close easily. A clear “close” button, not a tiny grey cross in the corner, and no pop-up that keeps coming back once someone has closed it.
- Emails with a clear way out. Every email you send to customers should have an unsubscribe link that works first time, with no account to log into.
- Optional extras that stay optional. If you add something new, like a chat box, a customer area or a booking tool, make it easy to find for the people who want it, and easy to ignore for the people who don’t.
It can feel like you’re losing something by making “no” easy. You’re not. People who can say no without a fight trust you more, and people who trust you are far more likely to say yes later. The customer who’s forced to accept something doesn’t become a fan of it. They become a little less of a fan of you.
So keep the reason they came at the front
That pair of headphones is still a great product. The sad part is that the business behind it took something customers loved and made it harder to love, not by making it worse, but by adding things nobody asked for and refusing to let them say no.
Your business almost certainly has a reason people love it too. Maybe it’s that you answer the phone. Maybe it’s that you explain things plainly, or that you turn up when you say you will. Whatever it is, that reason is worth protecting. Your website should say it clearly, early and often, and everything else on the page should either support it or step aside.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on that, we’re happy to help. Finding the words your customers actually use, and making sure your website leads with them, is what we do before we build anything. Book a 15-minute call. No pitch. Tell us what your customers love about you, and we’ll tell you honestly whether your website is saying it.