Do You Understand The Difference Between Features and Benefits?

If you study marketing gurus, they are always telling you to focus on benefits, not features, when you write sales copy or create ads.  Most business owners struggle with the features vs. benefits dilemma. Most business owners do not understand the difference. And because of this, most small-business marketing efforts don’t work!

Most small-business marketers assume that prospects will understand why they should buy the product just because they’ve been told about it. Therefore, business owners only communicate the features of their products to prospective customers and neglect to mention the benefits.

What Are Features?

Take a look at the list of features below related to our products.

Only 2 inches wide Only 4 inches high Locking Actuator Completely Stealth Maintenance free Batteries included

Each is a feature — a factual statement about the product or service being promoted. But features aren’t what entice customers to buy. That’s where benefits come in. A benefit answers the question “What’s in it for me; how does this solve my problem?” meaning the feature provides the customer with something of value to them. This is where most businesses go wrong:

The benefit of only 2 inches wide is that the stun gun is easy to hold. The benefit of only 4 inches high is the stun gun is easily concealable. The benefit of the locking actuator is the pepper spray has a safety switch. The benefit of completely stealth is no one will know the software is installed. The benefit of maintenance free is customer will not have to fix anything. The benefit of batteries included is the product is ready to use out of the box.

While these may seem like true benefits, they’re really just elaborations on the features. So what is truly a benefit?

The best way to understand the true benefit of your product, or to answer the “What’s in it for me; how does this solve my problem?” question, is to focus instead on the real reasons the customer thinks the features are important. A customer’s perception of each feature’s real reasons is what attracts him or her to a particular product. When someone chooses a stun gun that’s only 2 inches wide, the assumption is that the benefit is it’s easy to hold, but the actual real reasons are that it’s easier to grab in an emergency situation, making it quicker to use, making the user feel more confident in her ability to get it out of her purse and defend herself quickly — she feels safer. Those real reasons are the true benefits.

When you try to sell the features of your products, you’re making the customer do all the work to figure out why they want the feature. It’s in your best interest to draw the connection for them. But to do that, you have to know the real reasons yourself. Let’s take another look at that features list to see the possible real reasons the customers likes the features:

Only 4 inches high: If I’m going to carry a stun gun in my hand, I don’t want everyone to see it.  I don’t want people to think I’m paranoid and afraid. Or, the bad guy won’t know I have it in my hand because it so small and I’ll be able to shock him before he even knows I’m carrying the stun gun.  I won’t have to worry about him taking it away from me and using it on me because he doesn’t see it!

Locking Actuator: I don’t want this going off in my purse or when I’m showing it to friends.  I’m afraid I might spray myself.  I don’t want to look stupid.

Completely Stealth: I can see exactly what my child is looking at on the computer, but I feel a little guilty spying on him so I want to make sure he will never know I installed the software.  I don’t want him to think I don’t trust him.

Maintenance free: I suck at fixing things.  I want something that won’t break. I don’t want to feel dumb!

Batteries included: After I buy the product, I won’t have to worry about scrounging around the house looking for batteries or getting in the car and driving to Wal-Mart to buy some.

Even if you are using features and benefits in your sales copy and web pages, if you look again, you’ll probably see that your benefits are really just more features.

So now that you understand the difference between features and benefits, how do you apply this to your own business so you can start marketing your benefits? I have 3 suggestions below.

1. Know your customer. To know your customer, you must gather as much information as you can about your customer. Try to gather demographic data (age, sex, household income, family size, marital status, media preferences and so on) and psychographic data (attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests, opinions, lifestyles and so on).

If you are selling from a store or at a flea market and can talk to your customer face to face, you can start asking certain questions to begin developing a profile of your customers.  Just starting having conversations with your customers.

If you are selling online, the easiest way to get an accurate profile of your customers is to do a survey.  You can offer a free gift for their participation.  The easiest to use is www.surveymonkey.com.  Of course, this assumes you have a list of customers.

If you are just getting started, you will have to make some assumptions about who your customer is.  Try to define that customer as precisely as you can.  Even name him or her.  They when you write emails or sales copy for your website or ads, you write just to that person.

As your business grows, you will get a better feel for who your customer is and the problems they are trying to solve with your products.

2. Change your point-of-view. Whenever you write from your own point of view, you naturally fill in the blanks with assumptions. No matter the type of business you’re in, you think it’s great because you fully understand what you’re offering. But a prospect knows little or nothing about your products. They can’t make the same connections about it that you can.

Your demographic and psychographic information will allow you to discover what patterns exist among your customers. Using that information, you must learn to put yourself in their shoes as the buyer. Approach your own product as if you’d never seen it (which won’t be too hard for some of my distributors because they haven’t since we drop ship for them). Then ask yourself, and anyone else who will help you, “What are the real reasons these features will benefit me?” and “Why would I want to consider buying or switching?

3. Think in terms of real reasons. There’s nothing wrong with the term “benefits,” but if you refocus the problem to think in terms of “real reasons,” the situation becomes clearer. Your dilemma isn’t features vs. benefits, but rather features vs. real reasons. Start with your current features, and then take each one into the real reasons phase. Try out what you get on friends or family to see which ones spark their interest.

When you use this “real reasons” approach to discovering your business’ benefits, you can be sure the marketing messages you use to reach your prospects will be right on target. And that’s the surest way to get business!

How To Get The Most From Yourself And Others By Understanding The Basics of Motivation by Michael Gravette

At the most fundamental level, there are two basic kinds of motivation: the carrot or the stick. People are either trying to achieve something good or avoid something bad.

People naturally want things and either move towards the thing they want or move away from something they don’t want, thereby getting what they want.

It helps to understand what motivates you or someone else. It usually doesn’t work to use the stick on a carrot person or offer a carrot to a stick person. It will only cause frustration to everyone.

When you understand this, you don’t have to passively let motivation happen. You can now control what motivates you and the people you sell to.

If you are trying to motivate someone to buy your products, sometimes the carrot is a weak tool, especially if the person doesn’t feel in danger at the moment.

That’s why the stick works best sometimes. The polite thing would be to say, “Wouldn’t it be nice to carry a pepper spray so you would feel more secure when you leave your home.”

But, it would be more effective if you said, “The odds are 1 in 7 that you will be raped someday. Do you want to gamble with those odds or would you prefer to carry a $10 pepper spray?”

Instead of moving them towards the warm and fuzzy feeling of being safe and secure (the carrot), you want to make them aware of the bad that could happen so they will do whatever they can to avoid it (the stick). Your products will help them avoid the bad thing.

To understand better what motivates you and others, you have to understand the three basic desires that motivate people. All three of these have the carrot and stick variation.

One would be power. People want to either gain more power in their life or avoid feeling helpless.

The second would be association. People want to either do those things that will make them liked and admired by others or they want to avoid those things that will make people dislike them.

The third is accomplishment. People want to either succeed at things or avoid failing at things.

Unfortunately, most of the world does not have the ambition or prosperity consciousness to make the carrot effective. Most respond to fear or the stick: fear of being poor, fear of losing their home, fear of not having money for retirement or money for their children’s college, fear of someone taking what’s theirs or fear of someone hurting them.

There is no right or wrong to this, but it’s important that you understand it. It will give you greater insight to what motivates the people you sell to.

“Grab ‘em by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow.”

President Lyndon Baines Johnson said that. I’ll bet you didn’t know he was such a marketing genius. Well, maybe he wasn’t, but that quote is very important marketing advice.

Let me tell you a quick story.

Back in either 1987 or ’88, I was selling just stun guns. I was running an ad in USA today — a four line classified ad looking for distributors to sell my stun guns.

It was a much simpler time. No one was asking me how to sell the products. I was doing straight wholesale. People selling at flea markets, gun shows, trade shows, etc, would contact me for information on the stun guns and the prices, buy what they needed and sell them; hopefully, contacting me again to reorder.

At the time I thought I was in the wholesale business. It wasn’t until much later that I discovered I was in the marketing business.

I didn’t have a catalog; didn’t have employees; didn’t have an office; didn’t even have an 800 number. My main obstacle was educating people about what a stun gun was. Not too many people knew back then. Not like today.

One day I got a phone call. The person calling said they saw my ad in USA Today and wanted to ask me a few questions about the stun guns. I told the person I was busy and couldn’t talk right then and hung up on him.

The person calling was David Letterman. Back then he had a show called Late Night. One of the things he did during the show was look at the newspapers, find something interesting and call the phone number given. That day he saw my ad in USA Today about stun guns; didn’t know what a stun gun was and called me live from the show.

When I answered the phone, he identified himself and wanted to know if I could answer some questions about stun guns. I told him I was busy. Totally froze up. I’ve been kicking myself for over 20 years for letting that opportunity to promote myself and my product slip away.

Now how does this relate to President Johnson’s statement?

It has to do with big, bold, unusual, sometimes ridiculous marketing. I was afraid that David Letterman was going to make fun of me and my product. I did not understand then how valuable it would be to be humiliated by David Letterman on national TV. I was too passive, too afraid, not bold at all, and quite frankly, a dumb ass. Man, it hurts every time I think about it.

The first thing you need to do with your marketing is get their attention. If people are scanning websites looking for products that you carry, you need something on your website to make them stop and take notice. Get their attention first then you will be able to “capture their hearts and minds” and win them over and make them a customer.

If you are selling at flea markets, the same principal applies. You have to get people to notice you and stop. Do whatever it takes to stand out from the crowd. I use to fire stun guns off constantly. People were attracted to the sound and came over to see what it was. Did other vendors complain? Yes! But, I took the ‘slings and arrows’ and did it anyway.

Fortune favors the bold. The person not afraid to stick his neck out; not afraid to make a fool of himself; not afraid that people won’t like him…that’s the person that will get the opportunity to sell.

And, that’s what this is all about. Getting the opportunity. Getting noticed. Getting people curious; wanting to find out more. Getting your foot in the door.

To do that, you have to grab their attention. You won’t grab it with passive marketing or wimpy presentation of your products.

So, put up a video of you stunning yourself with a stun gun with a lot of bleeps in the audio to cover the swear words or wear a chicken suit and cluck when you are selling at a flea market.

Grab ‘em by the balls and their hearts and minds AND wallets will follow!

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