Features and Benefits
However you begin a career in Marketing, purposefully or accidentally, this is the first lesson they should be teaching you: The difference between a feature and a benefit. It’s a difficult lesson and, like languages, the older you are, the harder it is to learn. Once you see the light it’s like riding a bike; you can’t unlearn it and you can’t imagine how you ever had trouble with it.
Feature = what does it do.
Benefit = what does it do for me?
Consumers don’t care about features, they only respond to benefits. Product managers can’t talk about anything but features. Ask them for benefits and you’ll get a list of features. As them the benefit of a feature, and they’ll tell you the feature in different words. It makes the writer’s job very difficult.
To understand benefits you have to understand motivations. Don’t kid yourself, there are only two: Greed and Fear. Ask yourself two questions about your audience:
What do they want to gain?
What do they want to avoid?
Now go to town. Make a list of your features. Now turn each one into a benefit. Don’t cop-out and stop halfway.
An over-simplified example: Take a financial product: A wrap program. The audience is Investment Advisors (IAs). All wrap programs work essentially the same way – you gather a pile of information about your client, and assign them one of several pre-packaged portfolios based on their profile.
Feature: Offer your clients top-quality investment portfolios managed by the best in the business.
Almost Benefit: Do a little up-front research and you can give your lower net-worth clients quality financial management with little hands-on work on your part. No stock picking, no hand-holding.
Final Benefit: Time saved on the middle-class masses = more time to coddle more high-net-worth clients = more money in your pocket. (Greed) World-class investment strategy for the bulk of your clients = happy clients that don’t call and scream at you then take their money elsewhere. (Fear).
So there we go:
What do they want to gain? Money
What do they want to avoid? Loss of business
And if you know IAs, you know that that’s them in a nutshell.
Now, when you sit down to write – start with the benefits and use the features to support them.
It’s often difficult to make this transition. Hours and hours can go into interviewing clients trying to find out the true benefits offered by a product. Even more hours go into finding what benefits actually matter to the audience. All writers are journalists. We need to work very hard to see beyond the answers that we are given.
