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People Don’t Buy Products, They Buy Better Versions of Themselves (2016)

292 points by allenleein 9y ago

RichardHeart 9y ago
tldr: Turn features into benefits. People see more value in what a thing can do for them, than what traits it has that might let it do that thing. Often times features get all the press while utility is forgotten. Side note: People do buy things that make them worse people, though they might not realize it.
- shmerl 9y ago
  Does it mean people prefer to be told what to do with it, instead of figuring it out based on existing features? It would assume an approach that reflects some lack of creative thinking.
  - davidivadavid 9y ago
    It means that if you're creating a product that has a low level of awareness (common for startup products), then you need to emphasize benefits ("with product x, you'll get y result") rather than features ("product x is made with technology x,y,z"). Of course, it's a gross simplification to assume it's always the best and only way to communicate about a product (people who already know about the benefits will still want to know about the features), or that all products benefits from that approach (products that are mature are well understood, and talking about their benefits makes you sound like an idiot stating obvious things). One place where the benefits vs. feature distinction is important is in coming up with new product ideas: if you think in terms of benefits (it gets you X) instead of features (it's like X, except we switched tech-stack-X with tech-stack-Y), it helps you understand why people will buy it and where the value really lies. I do not agree that people buy things because it makes them better. They buy things because they perceive them as having higher utility (i.e. they satisfy their desires more than the alternatives). Being "better" is only one of many desires.
vortico 9y ago
I'm going to adopt this for my upcoming product, thanks for the advice! Although, I would argue that if you're in a field where people know exactly what they're looking for, it makes sense to be direct to your customer to say that they're drill bits, not that they create holes. But this should be obvious if you know what field you're in.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mc32 9y ago
The 1000 songs in your pocket, to me, didn't make you feel the better person, it was simply presenting the products usability up front, instead of distant descriptors. 5GB storage, what did _that_mean to the average consumer? People have said products have three main ways they get marketed. Specs: These are the physical characteristics. Emotional: You are keeping up appearances and are besting the Joneses. Spiritual: You are realizing your true inner self thru this bespoke vehicle.
- koolba 9y ago
  That can be reduced to two as the third category is a subset of the second.
- zitterbewegung 9y ago
  Maybe that was a bad example but I'm pretty sure that the white earbuds started being a status symbol and a sign that you were cool.
  - matt4077 9y ago
    Surly the causality was the iPod being cool first, and the earbuds becoming a representation of it?
    - chii 9y ago
      but why was the iPod cool in the first place? I'm sure it cant have anything to do with the massive advertising campaign where hip/cool people dancing while wearing the white earbuds...
      - valuearb 9y ago
        No one buys because of ads. They buy great products that meet their needs (in this case with the best design, UI and software). The ads tell or remind consumers those products exist, and how good they are for their needs. The ad is a trigger to a pre-existing match. The purchase decision is created by the match.
laurex 9y ago
This article doesn't mention Kathy Sierra, but as someone who has worked on User Onboard with Samuel, I know he'd want to give her some of the credit. https://www.amazon.com/Badass-Making-Awesome-Kathy-Sierra/dp/1491919019/ref=sr_1_1 https://www.amazon.com/Badass-Making-Awesome-Kathy-Sierra/dp...
spraak 9y ago
This is very similar to the paradigm of "jobs to be done". I.e. you don't buy a product, you hire a company to do a job for you.
- hyperpallium 9y ago
  It's an interesting take on it, to see it as incorporated as part of yourself. There's neurological evidence that when we use tools, we experience them as part of ourselves (or an extension of ourselves). Certainly, driving a car feels like you are driving (not talking about any social identity, the image of your car in the eyes of others, but the biomechanical act of driving itself). A tool or "hired for a job" can make you feel more capable - that you are more capable. You have changed, you are different. There are situations where a person does change, such as increased physical strength, aerobic fitness, stamina, and increased mental skill and knowledge. But a tool is a shortcut. For example, when google first came out, when you used it, you were better at search, you were faster, you were clearer in interpreting the results. In the early-adoption stages, perhaps there was also some hipster-like identity, from knowing about this new tool.
  - jacobush 9y ago
    For me, not perhaps... I had this super power which found answers to linux related question, every time!
taeric 9y ago
This looks dangerously close to survivor bias for examples. In particular, it is easy to give a reason for something having succeeded. At least, it is easier than giving the reason that something will succeed.
- blowski 9y ago
  Evolution also represents survivorship bias. The question is whether they survived _because_ of this approach, or whether the approach was unrelated to their success.
- kelnos 9y ago
  These approaches can easily be A/B tested, though, by using both feature-based and benefit-based marketing, and seeing if there's a significant difference in conversion rate. Just knowing that there are different marketing strategies you can employ will help you narrow down the best way to get people to want your product.
  - taeric 9y ago
    Can they, though? Most companies don't have the customer base to get real statistical power in these studies. Those that do, are likely winning in other ways. This is not too say I don't want to see these studies. Just still skeptical.
- superasn 9y ago
  Exactly what I was thinking. All these marketing studies that quote How Steve Jobs did it, or Google or Microsoft did it - I really can't relate to. These are billion dollar companies doing a lot of things and they too have flop products regardless of these brilliant tag lines.
stanislavb 9y ago
Old and gold
lngnmn 9y ago
To paraphrase Orhan Pamuk - "They don't buy clothes, they buy dreams (about themselves)". This is as old as humanity.
mikkom 9y ago
I find it extremely funny that under the Mario image that is basically saying "don't push your product, explain the benefits" they try to push their product without explaining the benefits.
svantana 9y ago
I dunno, there's something to this, but at the same time, it doesn't explain the popularity of fast food, alcohol, reality tv, and porn. My feeling is that marketing is a dark art, sort of like stock market investing or song writing. In that if there was a rational way to do it, then everybody would be doing it, thus nulling the effect.
- thisisit 9y ago
  I don't think it's about rationality. If it was how do you explain actual art ie drawing being something not everyone could do? It has more to do with people trying to frame an algorithm or logic behind these "dark arts". This article is an example of it. If everyone was to follow the same set of rules then sooner or later the market is filled with look-alike negating the effects. That is not something which would happen rather something already happens. So while the logic might be entirely fine it's over saturation kills that logic.
- erikb 9y ago
  What you describe are not products (e.g. Chicken McNuggets) but a category (e.g. fast food). The category has some reason for existance and success, and these are not explained in the article, true. What the article is trying to tell you is how you can beat Chicken McNuggets and gain a bigger share of the fast food market.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >but at the same time, it doesn't explain the popularity of fast food, alcohol, reality tv, and porn. Alcohol is all about creating a "better version of yourself" (short-term, while under the influence). And in reality tv and porn you watch better looking / more interesting others (porn, reality tv) to lose yourself.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    I'd add that fast food, as a short-term "hit", and like all kinds of instant (but shallow) highs, represses the anxiety of not being that better self.
- 9y ago
ouid 9y ago
>So, it seems like features are the “what” of your product or service, while benefits are the “why” behind it. I also found a really neat, old marketing quote that’s often attributed to Theodore Levitt (he attributes it to Leo McGinneva in this paper), on why people buy quarter-inch drill bits: "They don’t want quarter-inch bits. They want quarter-inch holes." So, the customer wants to make a quarter-inch hole for some reason. They buy a quarter-inch bit for their drill in order to achieve this. Marketing the drill bit based on its features (it fits into your drill) wouldn’t be as successful in this case as marketing it based on the benefits (you can create a quarter-inch hole). So after all of this reading, I finally distilled the difference into a sentence that I think makes it easy to distinguish between features and benefits: A feature is what your product does; a benefit is what the customer can do with your product. If a feature is what a product does, then isn't making quarter inch holes a feature of drill bits?
- erikb 9y ago
  It's not perfect though. If you make a brochure full of quarter-inch holes, a customer still won't buy your bits. I think in one of the two Steve Jobs movies the Pepsi guy explained it quite well: He shows how people open a Pepsi, drink it, and then feel whatever is important to them. What you need to do is actually present your features, but in a way that the customer believes he can achieve his benefits easily with it. Of course to be able to do that, you first need to understand the benefits the customer cares about. 1. present technical features -> be seen as weird nerd. 2. present benefits -> be seen as glitchy sales guy. 3. present features that let customer think about benefits -> sell products.
  - chii 9y ago
    > 3. present features that let customer think about benefits -> sell products. i.e., manipulate them psychologically to believe that the product is very suitable (when in reality, it may be a piece of shit).
  - myYCaccout 9y ago
    > 3. present features that let customer think about benefits -> sell products. I see this trend and it actually makes me furious. If I want to buy a GPU, I want to see the stats and how it compares to other products, not how many headshots i can make with that particular GPU. I'll see these ads on billboards, on tv etc and think of the greasy marketing people that want to trick me into buying their stuff. If the ads are to obnoxious I'll actually make an effort to avoid that brand ( looking at you Apple and Coca-Cola)
RangerScience 9y ago
Interesting, and way more interesting than I first suspected! I think this is case when you're trying to get new people into your market. Once they're in, they know enough that they do care about the features, but they also care enough to stick around to learn about those features. It also plays interestingly with the Burning Man ethos. I was expecting an article on lifestyle marketing, which is one of the things the BM ethos is set against: you cannot buy a thing to be a person - but instead the article (to me) points out the sweet spot: Does your product help me be the person I'm trying to be? The dev-style phrasing is maybe better: Buying products doesn't make me a good developer. Using (good) products clears blockers. But, is that missing the effect of things that give you new capabilities?
- orthoganol 9y ago
  Isn't paying burning man $500+ to go have this experience in the desert, and often hundreds more on costumes so you look the part, the epitome of "buying a thing to be a person"?
  - JammyDodger 9y ago
    Paying money to LARP as someone who wouldn't pay money for an identity. Pretty much sums up this century so far to me.
    - wsinks 9y ago
      Holy shit. Never thought about it that way.
  - lprubin 9y ago
    You can buy the ticket and the costumes, show up, and hide in your camp the entire time. I've seen people do exactly that. The ticket and the costumes just give you the opportunity. From there it's up to you to step up and create your own transformational experience and explore new ways of being yourself.
  - RangerScience 9y ago
amelius 9y ago
> When everyone else was saying “1GB storage on your MP3 player”, telling people about the product, Apple went ahead and made you a better person, that has 1000 songs in your pocket. How exactly is someone wearing a headset, and being lulled by BigContent, a "better person"?
- kelnos 9y ago
  I think you're reading it too literally: the iPod didn't make you a "better person", but it made your life better by allowing you to take all your music with you anywhere. (Obviously you have some disdain for big music content producers, but that's not really relevant. Most people don't, and they believed the iPod really did make their lives better, which is the thing that matters from a marketing standpoint.)
  - amelius 9y ago
    > I think you're reading it too literally: the iPod didn't make you a "better person", but it made your life better by allowing you to take all your music with you anywhere. Ok, but how is this different from the value-proposition of other music-device vendors?
- yathern 9y ago
  You're missing the point - the point is that the value of a product to the customer is how they imagine it will positively impact their life, not necessarily the technical specifications of that device. By rephrasing the technical prose in more human terms, it's more imaginable how an iPod can 'improve' your life - even if you personally disagree with the conclusion. When marketing to a wide audience, appeals to lifestyle image are often more effective than appeals to reason. That's very much part of why Apple has been so successful.
QuantumGravy 9y ago
This strategy can be taken too far. You can claim that your "comprehensive fractional imperial unit helical matter extraction system" will turn me into a sexy master craftsman all you want, but as much as that's a better version of myself, it still doesn't tell me how you're going to help me drill that quarter-inch hole. The most obvious example of this extreme is those drug ads with exuberant actors smiling in ecstasy and jumping in slow motion to an idyllic summertime setting. No, I'm not asking my doctor about Xymbaltrix™, and I probably don't want it in my search history either. Similarly, on the tech side, if my project on Platform X is stuck because of factor Y, I want to know what your product or consultants can actually do about it. Don't care if you call yourselves the world's leading Platform X Solutions Provider, spell out your capabilities please. Management, of course, eats up the "better versions of the themselves" talk, but if the goods aren't provided, our necks are on the line for not talking management out of it.
- Ntrails 9y ago
  I still find the adverts in the states bemusing. Can't say what a drug is designed to do, just tells you to ask your doctor about it.
  - tylerhou 9y ago
    That was true a few decades ago--right now you can say what a drug is for. (I'm sitting next to a TV showing a commercial for a drug which treats opioid induced constipation.)
    - QuantumGravy 9y ago
      Less than a decade ago, by my reckoning. Pretty sure there was a rash of ambiguous medications between 2007 and now. You're absolutely right about today's drug ads being too much information, of course.
    - Ntrails 9y ago
      Interesting - it's been nearly 10 years since I was last out!
orasis 9y ago
The "Jobs to be done" framework has clarified a lot of my thinking about marketing. The idea is that customers don't purchase products, they hire products to do a job for them. This is a good description and the first and only time I'll recommend a corporate free ebook: https://www.intercom.com/books/jobs-to-be-done https://www.intercom.com/books/jobs-to-be-done
demosito666 9y ago
> “Here’s what our product can do” and “Here’s what you can do with our product” sound similar, but they are completely different approaches. Yes, they are different: I don't want to hear the later in ads or any product description because I want to know the traits of the products and not how many girls will end up in my bed tonight should I buy it (spoiler: zero). This bullshit is one of the reasons I have to train myself to de-bullshittize surrounding world automatically.
- usmeteora 9y ago
  oh no worries dude, we get the same thing as girls too. Girls are marketed overpriced clothing and makeup, but in all honesty the only thing that makes the models attractive in those clothes is their investment in their diet, and long term skin care, and minimalist organic approach to really taking care of your body. Those things are way expensive than any clothes they are wearing, and require a lifestyle of discipline and long term changes that can take years to get to. If youre a model in that clothing, you also look just as as good in shorts and a tshirt from target, in act you probably just did an ad campaign with them last week. Once you figure out investing in your health and your glow as a person is the long term investment, everything else becomes less relevant. Nonethless, they do want you to believe the clothes are why the model looks so edgy and well tailored but it rarely has anything to do with that. Take care of your body, take care of your mind. less stuff, and a few high quality investments in minimalist clothing and thats the trick.
peter_vukovic 9y ago
This is advertising 101. Any good advertisement appeals to both rational and emotional aspects of your life: - This car moves you from place A to place B fast (rational) - This car makes you look cool sexy (emotional) With this in mind, "1000 songs in your pocket" appeals to the practical, rational side. It does not make you feel like a better person, it just makes you think "Wow, I can put here everything I ever want to listen." So this part is the mistake in the analysis. The product design and creative approach - specifically the iPod ads, which positioned the product as a part of a cool & hip look - are what made people feel they'll be way cooler if they owned that device.
- Danihan 9y ago
  idk, having 1k songs in my pocket makes me feel pretty badass...
  - peter_vukovic 9y ago
    Sure, but what I'm saying is that you probably wouldn't feel badass unless you also looked badass with those nice white headphones and a playlist dial. Or at least not to the same degree.
j-c-hewitt 9y ago
I have written thousands of product and service descriptions for everything ranging from products that sell relatively poorly to best-sellers in their category. "Sell the benefits and not the features" is page one/paragraph one of a large proportion of the copywriting and sales manuals out there. This is a good article, but it's also basic advice. People are also not entirely self-motivated. They may want to improve the condition of their family or a friend -- or to prevent themselves from getting worse than they are already. Loss aversion can be a more powerful motivator than a promise of an uncertain gain. The typical sales pitch for life insurance is to ensure that your family is taken care of, because there is no real benefit to the individual in most cases. Also, features play a different role in the sales process. Features are much more important when selling to experienced buyers. This advice to focus on the benefits can be taken too far, as in the case of some people who make things like diet pills in which they bury all the relevant information that a consumer might use to compare the offering to other products. For example you can say that the product burns fat using 'thermogenic' ingredients without mentioning that it's just caffeine. That way you would only be able to sell the diet pills to people who didn't know much about supplements that are supposed to raise your metabolic rate. People with experience in the market would see through the appeal and scroll right to the ingredients list, see that they could get the same thing for half the price, and bounce. The people who don't know better will overpay for your product and may eventually have complaints when they figure out that they've been duped. Ideally you should use different appeals for different kinds of prospects at different stages in the buying process. Someone who routinely buys a certain component as part of their job is really only going to care about the features and the price. Making it really easy for that kind of buyer to see that your product beats the competing ones on both features and/or price is going to win his business. Someone who doesn't even know enough about the product to evaluate the features is going to need a benefits-first sales approach. They don't know enough to evaluate the features, so they're not as relevant. For example, someone who doesn't know the difference between an SSD and an HDD will not understand why a laptop with the SSD acronym in the features makes it a higher performance machine worth a premium price. But if you explain to them that the machine boots in under 10 seconds thanks to the lightning-quick internal solid state drive (SSD) they may understand why it's worth a premium price compared to a laptop with an HDD. Sales and marketing types give this advice to engineers and other technical people about emphasizing benefits over features because people with technical knowledge are already aware of the benefits and may have a tough time understanding that other people are not similarly aware of the benefits of a given technological solution. But when experts are selling known solutions to experts, making it easy to evaluate features and buy with no fluff added can be a huge benefit in and of itself.
justforFranz 9y ago
And that.... is why I stopped buying stuff. :)

292 points by allenleein 9y ago

tldr: Turn features into benefits. People see more value in what a thing can do for them, than what traits it has that might let it do that thing. Often times features get all the press while utility is forgotten. Side note: People do buy things that make them worse people, though they might not realize it.

shmerl 9y ago
Does it mean people prefer to be told what to do with it, instead of figuring it out based on existing features? It would assume an approach that reflects some lack of creative thinking.
- davidivadavid 9y ago
  It means that if you're creating a product that has a low level of awareness (common for startup products), then you need to emphasize benefits ("with product x, you'll get y result") rather than features ("product x is made with technology x,y,z"). Of course, it's a gross simplification to assume it's always the best and only way to communicate about a product (people who already know about the benefits will still want to know about the features), or that all products benefits from that approach (products that are mature are well understood, and talking about their benefits makes you sound like an idiot stating obvious things). One place where the benefits vs. feature distinction is important is in coming up with new product ideas: if you think in terms of benefits (it gets you X) instead of features (it's like X, except we switched tech-stack-X with tech-stack-Y), it helps you understand why people will buy it and where the value really lies. I do not agree that people buy things because it makes them better. They buy things because they perceive them as having higher utility (i.e. they satisfy their desires more than the alternatives). Being "better" is only one of many desires.

vortico 9y ago

I'm going to adopt this for my upcoming product, thanks for the advice! Although, I would argue that if you're in a field where people know exactly what they're looking for, it makes sense to be direct to your customer to say that they're drill bits, not that they create holes. But this should be obvious if you know what field you're in.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

mc32 9y ago

The 1000 songs in your pocket, to me, didn't make you feel the better person, it was simply presenting the products usability up front, instead of distant descriptors. 5GB storage, what did _that_mean to the average consumer? People have said products have three main ways they get marketed. Specs: These are the physical characteristics. Emotional: You are keeping up appearances and are besting the Joneses. Spiritual: You are realizing your true inner self thru this bespoke vehicle.

koolba 9y ago
That can be reduced to two as the third category is a subset of the second.
zitterbewegung 9y ago
Maybe that was a bad example but I'm pretty sure that the white earbuds started being a status symbol and a sign that you were cool.
- matt4077 9y ago
  Surly the causality was the iPod being cool first, and the earbuds becoming a representation of it?
  - chii 9y ago
    but why was the iPod cool in the first place? I'm sure it cant have anything to do with the massive advertising campaign where hip/cool people dancing while wearing the white earbuds...
    - valuearb 9y ago
      No one buys because of ads. They buy great products that meet their needs (in this case with the best design, UI and software). The ads tell or remind consumers those products exist, and how good they are for their needs. The ad is a trigger to a pre-existing match. The purchase decision is created by the match.

laurex 9y ago

This article doesn't mention Kathy Sierra, but as someone who has worked on User Onboard with Samuel, I know he'd want to give her some of the credit. https://www.amazon.com/Badass-Making-Awesome-Kathy-Sierra/dp/1491919019/ref=sr_1_1 https://www.amazon.com/Badass-Making-Awesome-Kathy-Sierra/dp...

spraak 9y ago

This is very similar to the paradigm of "jobs to be done". I.e. you don't buy a product, you hire a company to do a job for you.

hyperpallium 9y ago
It's an interesting take on it, to see it as incorporated as part of yourself. There's neurological evidence that when we use tools, we experience them as part of ourselves (or an extension of ourselves). Certainly, driving a car feels like you are driving (not talking about any social identity, the image of your car in the eyes of others, but the biomechanical act of driving itself). A tool or "hired for a job" can make you feel more capable - that you are more capable. You have changed, you are different. There are situations where a person does change, such as increased physical strength, aerobic fitness, stamina, and increased mental skill and knowledge. But a tool is a shortcut. For example, when google first came out, when you used it, you were better at search, you were faster, you were clearer in interpreting the results. In the early-adoption stages, perhaps there was also some hipster-like identity, from knowing about this new tool.
- jacobush 9y ago
  For me, not perhaps... I had this super power which found answers to linux related question, every time!

taeric 9y ago

This looks dangerously close to survivor bias for examples. In particular, it is easy to give a reason for something having succeeded. At least, it is easier than giving the reason that something will succeed.

blowski 9y ago
Evolution also represents survivorship bias. The question is whether they survived _because_ of this approach, or whether the approach was unrelated to their success.
kelnos 9y ago
These approaches can easily be A/B tested, though, by using both feature-based and benefit-based marketing, and seeing if there's a significant difference in conversion rate. Just knowing that there are different marketing strategies you can employ will help you narrow down the best way to get people to want your product.
- taeric 9y ago
  Can they, though? Most companies don't have the customer base to get real statistical power in these studies. Those that do, are likely winning in other ways. This is not too say I don't want to see these studies. Just still skeptical.
superasn 9y ago
Exactly what I was thinking. All these marketing studies that quote How Steve Jobs did it, or Google or Microsoft did it - I really can't relate to. These are billion dollar companies doing a lot of things and they too have flop products regardless of these brilliant tag lines.

stanislavb 9y ago

Old and gold

lngnmn 9y ago

To paraphrase Orhan Pamuk - "They don't buy clothes, they buy dreams (about themselves)". This is as old as humanity.

mikkom 9y ago

I find it extremely funny that under the Mario image that is basically saying "don't push your product, explain the benefits" they try to push their product without explaining the benefits.

svantana 9y ago

I dunno, there's something to this, but at the same time, it doesn't explain the popularity of fast food, alcohol, reality tv, and porn. My feeling is that marketing is a dark art, sort of like stock market investing or song writing. In that if there was a rational way to do it, then everybody would be doing it, thus nulling the effect.

thisisit 9y ago
I don't think it's about rationality. If it was how do you explain actual art ie drawing being something not everyone could do? It has more to do with people trying to frame an algorithm or logic behind these "dark arts". This article is an example of it. If everyone was to follow the same set of rules then sooner or later the market is filled with look-alike negating the effects. That is not something which would happen rather something already happens. So while the logic might be entirely fine it's over saturation kills that logic.
erikb 9y ago
What you describe are not products (e.g. Chicken McNuggets) but a category (e.g. fast food). The category has some reason for existance and success, and these are not explained in the article, true. What the article is trying to tell you is how you can beat Chicken McNuggets and gain a bigger share of the fast food market.
coldtea 9y ago
>but at the same time, it doesn't explain the popularity of fast food, alcohol, reality tv, and porn. Alcohol is all about creating a "better version of yourself" (short-term, while under the influence). And in reality tv and porn you watch better looking / more interesting others (porn, reality tv) to lose yourself.
- coldtea 9y ago
  I'd add that fast food, as a short-term "hit", and like all kinds of instant (but shallow) highs, represses the anxiety of not being that better self.
9y ago

ouid 9y ago

>So, it seems like features are the “what” of your product or service, while benefits are the “why” behind it. I also found a really neat, old marketing quote that’s often attributed to Theodore Levitt (he attributes it to Leo McGinneva in this paper), on why people buy quarter-inch drill bits: "They don’t want quarter-inch bits. They want quarter-inch holes." So, the customer wants to make a quarter-inch hole for some reason. They buy a quarter-inch bit for their drill in order to achieve this. Marketing the drill bit based on its features (it fits into your drill) wouldn’t be as successful in this case as marketing it based on the benefits (you can create a quarter-inch hole). So after all of this reading, I finally distilled the difference into a sentence that I think makes it easy to distinguish between features and benefits: A feature is what your product does; a benefit is what the customer can do with your product. If a feature is what a product does, then isn't making quarter inch holes a feature of drill bits?

erikb 9y ago
It's not perfect though. If you make a brochure full of quarter-inch holes, a customer still won't buy your bits. I think in one of the two Steve Jobs movies the Pepsi guy explained it quite well: He shows how people open a Pepsi, drink it, and then feel whatever is important to them. What you need to do is actually present your features, but in a way that the customer believes he can achieve his benefits easily with it. Of course to be able to do that, you first need to understand the benefits the customer cares about. 1. present technical features -> be seen as weird nerd. 2. present benefits -> be seen as glitchy sales guy. 3. present features that let customer think about benefits -> sell products.
- chii 9y ago
  > 3. present features that let customer think about benefits -> sell products. i.e., manipulate them psychologically to believe that the product is very suitable (when in reality, it may be a piece of shit).
- myYCaccout 9y ago
  > 3. present features that let customer think about benefits -> sell products. I see this trend and it actually makes me furious. If I want to buy a GPU, I want to see the stats and how it compares to other products, not how many headshots i can make with that particular GPU. I'll see these ads on billboards, on tv etc and think of the greasy marketing people that want to trick me into buying their stuff. If the ads are to obnoxious I'll actually make an effort to avoid that brand ( looking at you Apple and Coca-Cola)

RangerScience 9y ago

Interesting, and way more interesting than I first suspected! I think this is case when you're trying to get new people into your market. Once they're in, they know enough that they do care about the features, but they also care enough to stick around to learn about those features. It also plays interestingly with the Burning Man ethos. I was expecting an article on lifestyle marketing, which is one of the things the BM ethos is set against: you cannot buy a thing to be a person - but instead the article (to me) points out the sweet spot: Does your product help me be the person I'm trying to be? The dev-style phrasing is maybe better: Buying products doesn't make me a good developer. Using (good) products clears blockers. But, is that missing the effect of things that give you new capabilities?

orthoganol 9y ago
Isn't paying burning man $500+ to go have this experience in the desert, and often hundreds more on costumes so you look the part, the epitome of "buying a thing to be a person"?
- JammyDodger 9y ago
  Paying money to LARP as someone who wouldn't pay money for an identity. Pretty much sums up this century so far to me.
  - wsinks 9y ago
    Holy shit. Never thought about it that way.
- lprubin 9y ago
  You can buy the ticket and the costumes, show up, and hide in your camp the entire time. I've seen people do exactly that. The ticket and the costumes just give you the opportunity. From there it's up to you to step up and create your own transformational experience and explore new ways of being yourself.
- RangerScience 9y ago

amelius 9y ago

> When everyone else was saying “1GB storage on your MP3 player”, telling people about the product, Apple went ahead and made you a better person, that has 1000 songs in your pocket. How exactly is someone wearing a headset, and being lulled by BigContent, a "better person"?

kelnos 9y ago
I think you're reading it too literally: the iPod didn't make you a "better person", but it made your life better by allowing you to take all your music with you anywhere. (Obviously you have some disdain for big music content producers, but that's not really relevant. Most people don't, and they believed the iPod really did make their lives better, which is the thing that matters from a marketing standpoint.)
- amelius 9y ago
  > I think you're reading it too literally: the iPod didn't make you a "better person", but it made your life better by allowing you to take all your music with you anywhere. Ok, but how is this different from the value-proposition of other music-device vendors?
yathern 9y ago
You're missing the point - the point is that the value of a product to the customer is how they imagine it will positively impact their life, not necessarily the technical specifications of that device. By rephrasing the technical prose in more human terms, it's more imaginable how an iPod can 'improve' your life - even if you personally disagree with the conclusion. When marketing to a wide audience, appeals to lifestyle image are often more effective than appeals to reason. That's very much part of why Apple has been so successful.

QuantumGravy 9y ago

This strategy can be taken too far. You can claim that your "comprehensive fractional imperial unit helical matter extraction system" will turn me into a sexy master craftsman all you want, but as much as that's a better version of myself, it still doesn't tell me how you're going to help me drill that quarter-inch hole. The most obvious example of this extreme is those drug ads with exuberant actors smiling in ecstasy and jumping in slow motion to an idyllic summertime setting. No, I'm not asking my doctor about Xymbaltrix™, and I probably don't want it in my search history either. Similarly, on the tech side, if my project on Platform X is stuck because of factor Y, I want to know what your product or consultants can actually do about it. Don't care if you call yourselves the world's leading Platform X Solutions Provider, spell out your capabilities please. Management, of course, eats up the "better versions of the themselves" talk, but if the goods aren't provided, our necks are on the line for not talking management out of it.

Ntrails 9y ago
I still find the adverts in the states bemusing. Can't say what a drug is designed to do, just tells you to ask your doctor about it.
- tylerhou 9y ago
  That was true a few decades ago--right now you can say what a drug is for. (I'm sitting next to a TV showing a commercial for a drug which treats opioid induced constipation.)
  - QuantumGravy 9y ago
    Less than a decade ago, by my reckoning. Pretty sure there was a rash of ambiguous medications between 2007 and now. You're absolutely right about today's drug ads being too much information, of course.
  - Ntrails 9y ago
    Interesting - it's been nearly 10 years since I was last out!

orasis 9y ago

The "Jobs to be done" framework has clarified a lot of my thinking about marketing. The idea is that customers don't purchase products, they hire products to do a job for them. This is a good description and the first and only time I'll recommend a corporate free ebook: https://www.intercom.com/books/jobs-to-be-done https://www.intercom.com/books/jobs-to-be-done

demosito666 9y ago

> “Here’s what our product can do” and “Here’s what you can do with our product” sound similar, but they are completely different approaches. Yes, they are different: I don't want to hear the later in ads or any product description because I want to know the traits of the products and not how many girls will end up in my bed tonight should I buy it (spoiler: zero). This bullshit is one of the reasons I have to train myself to de-bullshittize surrounding world automatically.

usmeteora 9y ago
oh no worries dude, we get the same thing as girls too. Girls are marketed overpriced clothing and makeup, but in all honesty the only thing that makes the models attractive in those clothes is their investment in their diet, and long term skin care, and minimalist organic approach to really taking care of your body. Those things are way expensive than any clothes they are wearing, and require a lifestyle of discipline and long term changes that can take years to get to. If youre a model in that clothing, you also look just as as good in shorts and a tshirt from target, in act you probably just did an ad campaign with them last week. Once you figure out investing in your health and your glow as a person is the long term investment, everything else becomes less relevant. Nonethless, they do want you to believe the clothes are why the model looks so edgy and well tailored but it rarely has anything to do with that. Take care of your body, take care of your mind. less stuff, and a few high quality investments in minimalist clothing and thats the trick.

peter_vukovic 9y ago

This is advertising 101. Any good advertisement appeals to both rational and emotional aspects of your life: - This car moves you from place A to place B fast (rational) - This car makes you look cool sexy (emotional) With this in mind, "1000 songs in your pocket" appeals to the practical, rational side. It does not make you feel like a better person, it just makes you think "Wow, I can put here everything I ever want to listen." So this part is the mistake in the analysis. The product design and creative approach - specifically the iPod ads, which positioned the product as a part of a cool & hip look - are what made people feel they'll be way cooler if they owned that device.

Danihan 9y ago
idk, having 1k songs in my pocket makes me feel pretty badass...
- peter_vukovic 9y ago
  Sure, but what I'm saying is that you probably wouldn't feel badass unless you also looked badass with those nice white headphones and a playlist dial. Or at least not to the same degree.

j-c-hewitt 9y ago

I have written thousands of product and service descriptions for everything ranging from products that sell relatively poorly to best-sellers in their category. "Sell the benefits and not the features" is page one/paragraph one of a large proportion of the copywriting and sales manuals out there. This is a good article, but it's also basic advice. People are also not entirely self-motivated. They may want to improve the condition of their family or a friend -- or to prevent themselves from getting worse than they are already. Loss aversion can be a more powerful motivator than a promise of an uncertain gain. The typical sales pitch for life insurance is to ensure that your family is taken care of, because there is no real benefit to the individual in most cases. Also, features play a different role in the sales process. Features are much more important when selling to experienced buyers. This advice to focus on the benefits can be taken too far, as in the case of some people who make things like diet pills in which they bury all the relevant information that a consumer might use to compare the offering to other products. For example you can say that the product burns fat using 'thermogenic' ingredients without mentioning that it's just caffeine. That way you would only be able to sell the diet pills to people who didn't know much about supplements that are supposed to raise your metabolic rate. People with experience in the market would see through the appeal and scroll right to the ingredients list, see that they could get the same thing for half the price, and bounce. The people who don't know better will overpay for your product and may eventually have complaints when they figure out that they've been duped. Ideally you should use different appeals for different kinds of prospects at different stages in the buying process. Someone who routinely buys a certain component as part of their job is really only going to care about the features and the price. Making it really easy for that kind of buyer to see that your product beats the competing ones on both features and/or price is going to win his business. Someone who doesn't even know enough about the product to evaluate the features is going to need a benefits-first sales approach. They don't know enough to evaluate the features, so they're not as relevant. For example, someone who doesn't know the difference between an SSD and an HDD will not understand why a laptop with the SSD acronym in the features makes it a higher performance machine worth a premium price. But if you explain to them that the machine boots in under 10 seconds thanks to the lightning-quick internal solid state drive (SSD) they may understand why it's worth a premium price compared to a laptop with an HDD. Sales and marketing types give this advice to engineers and other technical people about emphasizing benefits over features because people with technical knowledge are already aware of the benefits and may have a tough time understanding that other people are not similarly aware of the benefits of a given technological solution. But when experts are selling known solutions to experts, making it easy to evaluate features and buy with no fluff added can be a huge benefit in and of itself.

justforFranz 9y ago

And that.... is why I stopped buying stuff. :)