MARKETING MATTERS: DEFINING THE BENEFITS IN YOUR PRODUCT

TIPS AND TRICKS FOR BUSINESS SUCCESS AND GROWTH

By Rama Beerfas

March 1, 2010 (San Diego’s East County) – We’ve talked about the concept of selling benefits instead of features in order to give your audience the inducement to make the purchase. Now, we need to solidly define the term "benefit."

First of all, when you are marketing your product (again, read “product” as a product or service), it makes no difference to the customer if you benefit in some way from an item’s production, sales or post-sale process if there are no tangible or measurable benefits in it to the consumer as well. All talking points must be benefits as perceived from the customer’s point of view.

Taking that into consideration, determine what outcome(s) the customer will enjoy by using the product in question and you have just discovered your benefit statement(s).

To check that it is indeed a benefit statement, just make sure that you can word your perceived statement as a “You will…” statement. For example, you might think it’s cool that your product is made from the latest space age material, but how does that benefit the customer? How about, “You will save money on shipping costs because this latest space age material is 50% lighter than the traditional components used in this product.” By saving money on shipping costs, your customer can now either charge less for their product, making them more competitive; or, keep prices the same and increase the money going directly to their bottom line - I call that a benefit!

The benefit to the customer must be something that will make an impact on their lives or business in a tangible way (e.g. “This spray will reduce sunburn pain 75% faster than the leading brand.”), emotional way (e.g. “Especially for the purple lover, this mug now comes in three shades of purple.”), or in a measurable way (see the example in the above paragraph).

What it all comes down to is that, not matter how exciting/cool/neat/imaginative/etc… your feature is, if it does not provide that tangible, emotional or measurable benefit that can be defined and described to the customer, then it is not a selling point.

Rama Beerfas is the Chief Solutions Specialist of San Diego-based Lev Promotions, offering marketing consulting, promotional products, promotional marketing programs, and more. Rama also offers seminars and training in topics related to marketing and customer service. She can be reached at (619) 697-2045 or at rama@levpromotions.com. Please submit requests for column topics, questions or comments to the above e-mail address.