The power of benefit-led communication

Back in 2001, when Steve Jobs introduced the first iPod to the world, the technology itself wasn’t new. MP3 players had actually been on the market for the longest time, but that didn’t stop him – in fact, he knew exactly how to sell it by creating a need. At that time, he didn’t pull it out of his pocket and say, “The iPod. A 5G MP3 player!”

Not at all. Instead, he said, “The iPod. 1,000 songs in your pocket.” See the difference? He didn’t sell the features – he sold the benefits that customers would appreciate, and most importantly, understand! Ever since then, marketing as we know it was revolutionized, and the dominant goal became to market with clear benefits to customers.

For the longest time, brands have focused on marketing the features of their products and services in their communication. Yet, today, that no longer works. Instead, it’s all about “what’s in it for me?” Why should they care about your offerings? That’s the question that crosses every customer’s mind before purchasing a product or acquiring a service, and if you think about it, it makes sense. After all, you need to give your customers a reason to use your products or services because they’re going to invest money into it and need to reap some benefit in return, right? But don’t features provide the answers to that question? Not exactly. Instead, benefits do. While it’s important to highlight both in your marketing communication, benefits need to take the lead.

Linking Benefits to Features - Back to Basics

Sometimes you may take a trip down memory lane and remember how trim you looked when you had your bicycle, and you might feel that it might be part of the solution to shedding off a few pounds now. Imagine one day you decide to act on those feelings and actually go to a cycle store and tell the attendant that you are looking to buy a bicycle to ride around the area on casual evenings when the sun has almost set and then he enthusiastically puts you through a lecture of series of options that will be ideal and how he can't immediately pick one because it has cantilever brakes or one that has a drive train, or the blue one with disc brakes or he points to one of the bicycles set on an elevated platform which he thinks might be the best but is quite expensive for casual evenings. At this point, I'm sure you are exhausted, and these are just a few scenarios off the top of my head. These confusing situations happen all the time; they wear you out mentally and discourage you from getting that thing done. You are totally lost amidst all the facts, and you feel incompetent because you understand nothing that is going on. That's why you should never focus only on the features of a product but mainly on its benefits.

There’s no denying that features get the lion’s share of attention, but benefits take the lead when it comes to incentivizing customers to actually make the purchase. That's because benefits, not features, drive value.

On a daily basis, customers receive an overwhelming number of marketing messages from brands and businesses, but how many of those do they really care about? It depends on the benefits. Because most products have new features, but how many actually have compelling benefits? Real benefits?

But let’s take a few steps back. What’s the difference between benefits and features? Aren’t they the same thing anyway? In fact, they aren’t, but I understand where the line can become blurry.

Say you’re promoting your new coffee machine that comes with super-fast speed settings that are unheard of in the market. It’ll be tempting to just state that sentence as it is, but how about if you say something along the lines of “never show up late to work again and get your coffee in less than a minute”?

It's more appealing, no? That's the difference – features focus on what the product or service does (its functions), while benefits focus on how that product or service will make your customers' lives better. In other words, features are the attributes of a product or service, while benefits are the advantages that customers enjoy from those features and the product or service at large.

To do marketing right, you should be able to link your features with benefits, so I’m not saying you should put your features aside and just market benefits; far from that! Instead, use your product or service’s features to show how they’ll enable your customers to do, achieve, or feel something. Basically, showcase the feature and then showcase its outcome.

Always remember that customers are rarely interested in buying something "just because" – they always want something to solve their problems or tackle their pain points. So, as much as we all wish there were a magic wand, an all-in-one formula to enable us to sell our products in a split second, there really isn't one, except leading by benefits!

It really all comes down to storytelling; it's just how human beings are wired. Stories are how customers (both in B2B and B2C industries) make sense of businesses and brands and decide what to go for and what to avoid.

It has been scientifically proven that people will prefer to be told what to do by experts rather than make decisions themselves. Your goal is to impress them with your sales pitch and not confuse them with data they may not be knowledgeable enough to process. So it would help if you confidently told them what choices to make and why they should make those choices, for example, Instead of saying, "there are various affordable listings that you can access through our website." You could rather say, "here is a once in a lifetime opportunity to buy the house you always dreamt about as a kid with the affordable prices that we offer." But nobody wants to listen to you drone on about yourself and your business and your product.

You want to make sure that in all the advertisements that you put out and in all the information displayed on your website that you continuously refer back to the problem that your product is solving so that they are constantly aware of what is at stake if they decide not to purchase your product. An easier way to sell a product feature as a benefit is to ask yourself why it matters. You can pretend that a customer just walked into your office, and after you explained a feature to the customer, they responded by asking you, "so what?" Instead of saying, "our toothbrush delivery will deliver your toothbrush every six weeks," rather say, "You never have to remind yourself to replace your toothbrush again." All human decisions to buy a product or pay for service come from a place of emotion. Even individuals that are the best logical thinkers buy products based on a feeling of fear or desire. Explain to them how your product will aid their day-to-day lives without taking advantage of their emotions.

Which Is Better? And How Much Is Better Worth?

The answer to this question is dependent on how important the benefits are. Benefits are what keeps a marketing strategy alive, and your stories are completely irrelevant without it. In this twenty-first century, business organizations task teams and individuals with coming up with a "new" feature. But what really matters is that the customers are convinced that your product can make their lives better. People encounter high levels of stress daily and will be on the lookout for any product or service that can make their lives easier. Your job as the person pitching the idea is to help your customers understand the relationship between the features of your product and the benefits.

In the tech industry, mobile phones can be used as an example. Phone companies announce new phone models annually, and of course, they are always more improved than the last model. Features like wireless charging, 5G networking broadband, voice assistants, and smart phones that can make decisions for you based on your wrist or body movement. Capabilities like these qualify as new, but they may not immediately seem like they could add any value to their lives to a customer. Imagine what real difference a foldable phone can make, nothing much. You could call it useless aesthetics. And useless aesthetics like these are why very few new products actually make a difference on the market. So when you get in your creative mode and are ready to make an improvement on your product. It would be best to think of what really matters to the customer to help guide you on the kinds of improvements to make.

When you start to view your product or service as a solution to people's problems and are able to articulate the issue or dilemma it addresses, you are one step closer to winning your customers over. Of course, when you speak to customers, they should feel an emotional connection to the product which they haven't even bought yet. But you can make them relate to the product and trust you and the product that achieves the impossible in the business world.

Reading out a lot of information may quickly become monotonous, and you may lose your customer's mind in it. To make sure that your customer is constantly following you, you may mention a problem that your product will solve from time to time. As I said, people are open to buying anything that will make their lives easier. So instead of being so positive the whole time, you want to remind the customer about the "why" of your business. The art of marketing is to focus on the customer's viewpoint, which boils down to emphasizing the benefits that are of most interest to them and not the benefits that are of most interest to us as manufacturers or sales associates. And the benefit that customers are most emotionally motivated by may serve as the "why" of your business. In marketing, your biggest asset is empathy, and this emotion will allow you to put yourself in your customers' shoes, learn some of their innate desires, and devise a way to make them come true. As you continue to combine your knowledge and the desire to make the lives of your customers better, then you have all the ingredients you need, and all that's left is time. So your business grows, this can help you diversify, increase the fees you charge, and have the luxury of dropping clients who give you a hard time. This way you have more fun and enjoy what you do.