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Well, first, I'm not necessarily the best copywriter in the world ;) Now, you can be much more "under the radar", and focus a little more on technical features

Well, first, I'm not necessarily the best copywriter in the world ;) Now, you can be much more "under the radar", and focus a little more on technical features, but still from the user's perspective. Look at rust's landing page : https://www.rust-lang.org/ https://www.rust-lang.org/ , or clion's : https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/ https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/ They use "you" a lot, and rather than telling "our product has such and such and such feature", say "you can solve this problem thanks to this feature, and this other problem with this other feature". "With CLion, you can create code that's beautiful and correct at the same time. Potential code issues are identified instantly and fixed as you type! Be sure all the proper changes are handled automatically by CLion. CLion also performs Data Flow analysis to find out all the cases of the unreachable code, infinite recursion and more." is more appealing to me than "CLion features a dataflow analyzer that is 47% more efficient than eclipse and can detect 153% more potential bugs (unreachable code, infinite recursion, etc.)".

TeMPOraL 8y ago
Thanks for those examples. I agree, they both seem to follow the pattern of "$product lets you solve $yourproblem", or "Thanks to $features, $product lets you solve $yourproblem". Thanks to your comments, I'll be paying much more attention to use of the word "you" on product pages from now on :). As for my objection - my favourite product descriptions follow the pattern of listing concrete features, and concrete problems they're meant to solve. I feel it's because I know the problems I have, I know what the features mean, and I don't trust vendors to be honest about general description. I think (I hope) this could be said about most technical people in technical fields. The product pages for Rust and CLion essentially enumerate concrete features in prose, and that's why I like them. In CLion's case, this line didn't resonate with me: > With CLion, you can create code that's beautiful and correct at the same time. Potential code issues are identified instantly and fixed as you type! ... but it got rescued by an attached screenshot, that effectively communicated what kind of issues they're talking about. > [...] is more appealing to me than "CLion features a dataflow analyzer that is 47% more efficient than eclipse and can detect 153% more potential bugs [...] Yeah, I don't like that imaginary line too, but that's because "47% better than competition", "153% better than competition" pattern-matches to me to car salesmen bullshit.
- davidivadavid 8y ago
  That must be because you're only considering products for which you've done extensive research / have intimate knowledge of. Customers at early stages of the purchase cycle are often not aware of the problems a given product solves. They need to be educated about the value of the product by starting from a higher level. It's only when people are sold on the value of the product that they're interested in learning how the product delivers that benefit and what its features are. The message has to match the sophistication of the reader.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Sure, but you're not selling me on the value of the product with platitudes and meaningless sentences. Sentences like "X lets you solve your Y problems faster and better" have near-zero information value, because they don't define reference point and scale for "faster" and "better", nor do they say what "Y problems" it's helping to solve. I feel such copywriting only preys on people who can't read with understanding.

TeMPOraL 8y ago

Thanks for those examples. I agree, they both seem to follow the pattern of "$product lets you solve $yourproblem", or "Thanks to $features, $product lets you solve $yourproblem". Thanks to your comments, I'll be paying much more attention to use of the word "you" on product pages from now on :). As for my objection - my favourite product descriptions follow the pattern of listing concrete features, and concrete problems they're meant to solve. I feel it's because I know the problems I have, I know what the features mean, and I don't trust vendors to be honest about general description. I think (I hope) this could be said about most technical people in technical fields. The product pages for Rust and CLion essentially enumerate concrete features in prose, and that's why I like them. In CLion's case, this line didn't resonate with me: > With CLion, you can create code that's beautiful and correct at the same time. Potential code issues are identified instantly and fixed as you type! ... but it got rescued by an attached screenshot, that effectively communicated what kind of issues they're talking about. > [...] is more appealing to me than "CLion features a dataflow analyzer that is 47% more efficient than eclipse and can detect 153% more potential bugs [...] Yeah, I don't like that imaginary line too, but that's because "47% better than competition", "153% better than competition" pattern-matches to me to car salesmen bullshit.

davidivadavid 8y ago
That must be because you're only considering products for which you've done extensive research / have intimate knowledge of. Customers at early stages of the purchase cycle are often not aware of the problems a given product solves. They need to be educated about the value of the product by starting from a higher level. It's only when people are sold on the value of the product that they're interested in learning how the product delivers that benefit and what its features are. The message has to match the sophistication of the reader.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Sure, but you're not selling me on the value of the product with platitudes and meaningless sentences. Sentences like "X lets you solve your Y problems faster and better" have near-zero information value, because they don't define reference point and scale for "faster" and "better", nor do they say what "Y problems" it's helping to solve. I feel such copywriting only preys on people who can't read with understanding.