When benefits aren't beneficial
by Andrew Shedden
So, after many years of trouble your ship has come in. Yes, the world has finally discovered the wisdom of buying your patented two-legged chairs and you are rolling in the dough. You have wisely decided to purchase the car of your dreams before the lawsuits begin to accumulate. Ah, but what car to buy? Do you buy a Mercedes S class? Perhaps purchasing a Porsche 911 is much more to your liking? Alternately, an authentic Jaguar XKE would suit you just fine.
After careful consideration and a great deal of soul searching you determine the automobile of your dreams needs to offer a few key benefits you feel are absolute "must-haves." Because it's hard enough for you to make even simple decisions you decide to further narrow down your list. Being a fairly logical person you go through the typical days of agonizing and finally reduce your list to the single most important benefit.
You begin to closely read the marketing materials and advertisements about cars in your extravagant price range. One momentous day you are delighted to see that BMW is advertising the little known fact that they manufacture the best spare tire in the entire automotive world. Their position is that a state of the art spare tire is the hallmark of the true connoisseur of fine automobiles.
Based on this information you go out and plonk down $100,000 on a brand new BMW M5. You are totally oblivious to the marketing messages of all of the other luxury car manufacturers. They may stress prestige, performance, or faultless engineering in their marketing messages but you disdainfully view all of these messages as being entirely superfluous. You happily drive away, secure in the knowledge that you've got it covered if you ever encounter a road hazard that punctures your tire.
This is an absurd example but not as absurd as you might think. In fact, many companies in virtually every market you care to think of spend time stressing the "spare tire" rather than what's truly important to their prospects. There is great danger in promoting the wrong benefit.
Stressing the wrong benefit can be worse than stressing nothing at all
It is of paramount importance to accurately determine the key benefit being sought by your market. The problem is that what you deem to be important about your business may be totally irrelevant in the eyes of your prospects. In the fictitious example above its obvious to anyone with a scintilla of sense that no luxury car maker (let alone the excellent BMW company) would be long in business stressing the benefit found inherent quality of their spare tire.
Stressing an obvious benefit isn't going to really help
This is a trap into which many businesses fall. Let's say you own a contracting company. When you are putting together your marketing communications work you decide that the benefit you will stress to your prospects is that "We Do Good Work." Well, I haven't yet seen a successful company promote lousy work. The point of all this is that many benefits are implicitly understood. If you own a law firm it doesn't make much sense to stress that all of your partners are law school graduates.
What really matters to prospects
The following paragraph is probably the single hardest concept for most company owners to grasp. Most prospects don't really care about who you are or the state of your wonderful widgets. This is obviously a very strong statement so I'll rephrase it for you. Most prospects don't care what you have to say about your company and its products. They do care about what you can do for them.
Companies try in vain to sell features not realizing that prospects buy benefits. People buy goods and services for what they do for them. Don't tell your prospects about what you have for them, tell them what you can do for them. Before you tell them what you can do for them find out what's truly important to them. Once you know the best benefit and stress it in your communications your sales will skyrocket.
Here's an example
The originally named Joe Smith owns the local automotive repair facility. He decides to expand his customer base by further promotion in the local market area. He realizes that his single biggest point of differentiation is the fact that he has five service bays. Joe says "You know, we've got five service bays in our garage, more than anyone else around here. That's the benefit we need to promote." Well actually, close, but no banana. Five service bays are a merely a feature of your garage.
In order for Joe to really improve sales volumes, he needs to first find out the benefits being sought by his target markets. Once he knows these benefits he needs to craft an appropriate benefits-laden marketing message.
I would tell Joe that the most likely common key benefit of five service bays is fast service. This means less time spent sitting around a garage. For a salesperson the benefit could be stated as more time on the road to selling their widgets. To the local dog-loving eccentric five service bays may provide him with more time to take his faithful dog Fido out for his daily car ride.
Obviously the fact that you offer friendly service, a strong guarantee, and top quality goods and services is important. For many prospects these benefits are understood as being the minimum prerequisites or conditions to initiate a business relationship. Never underestimate the importance of uncovering and addressing the best benefit.
In our next issue you'll learn how to determine your best benefit.
