[zemvpferreira]

It's a trope with some truth to it, but it runs out of steam fairly quickly. Was original facebook a painkiller? Instagram? $1000 iPhone? Liver King?

I find it's a useful framework for selling b2b. Even then, desire can win over pain many times.

Fear and greed are the real big sellers in b2b anyway.

[matkoniecz]

> Was original facebook a painkiller? Instagram?

I would say that it was closer to a tasty pizza.

It was definitely not fitting either "vitamin" (worth investing for future payoff) or painkiller (solving immediate and urgent need[1])

[1] I guess that hiding/temporary fix is not intended to be part of this allegory

[fxtentacle]

At my university, Facebook was the painkiller for involuntary celibacy ;)

[astrange]

Lots of people run businesses out of their Instagram accounts. Might not be what it was for, but those followers can be valuable.

[a4isms]

It doesn't run out of steam so much as it fits a particular scope better than others. We can bend over backwards to make it fit other scopes, like another commenter points out: FOMO is a headache, and social media could be called the aspirin.

I personally find that metaphors work best as mnemonics. Unless you're in health sciences, products are neither vitamins, nor painkillers. If this metaphor helps us remember to distinguish products that solve urgent and existing problems from products that are investments providing an ROI over time... Good enough for me.

Now about fear and greed. I agree with you. In fact, I do so because when I was in sales and marketing, I read a book that said that the four motivations that mattered were fear, greed, exclusivity, and belonging. The first two are literally what you just mentioned.

That particular simplification doesn't fit every situation any more than Maslow's Hierarchy does, but it's another surprisingly useful lens to use when looking at value propositions.

At the end of the day, all these rules of thumbs and metaphors are tools, if you find one that's useful, add it to your toolbox and figure out when it works and when it doesn't. The more of these you have, the more ways you have of analyzing a situation and coming up with a rough model for how it works.

So I agree with you: Fear and greed are the big sellers in B2B.

[OkayPhysicist]

The original facebook was a painkiller the same way the Oxycodone you crush up on a table and insuffulate is a painkiller. The metaphor works amusingly well, actually.

[beambot]

Youthful hormones and social belonging are pains too... Consumer pains are often more abstract.

[mjevans]

iPhone was / is a 'status symbol' and 'fashion accessory', which happened to be way better than the clunky, expensive, and poor UI mobile phones which came before, (aside from Blackberry, which was a corp status symbol, work / gov focused, not average consumer.)