From my blog

Sell on features, not benefits

Marketers love Apple. But their adulation is curiously selective. Everybody loves the purity of the brand messages, but the near-total aversion to social media and content marketing gets a lot less attention.

Similarly, everyone can see that Apple’s relentless focus on the product is a big part of its success. But not everyone is willing to follow it down the road of pure product focus in marketing terms. Especially when it goes so far as to end up privileging features over benefits.

Let me show you what I mean with the campaign for the original iPod.

Screen Shot 2013-10-03 at 15.24.08

For me, ‘1000 songs in your pocket’ is a great line. Not just because of the actual words – I think many writers who sat with the iPod brief for a while might well come up with that, or something like it. The genius is in deciding to actually go ahead and run it. Not every brand, and not every CEO, would be happy to use something that sails so close to straight-out description. So when I call this great work, I’m ascribing greatness to all involved: Steve Jobs, Lee Clow at Chiat/Day and copywriter James Vincent, who actually proposed the line.

Feature or benefit?

‘1000 songs in your pocket’. Now, is that a feature or a benefit? If we take it as referring purely to the capacity of the device, it’s a feature. If we sold luggage with the line ‘1000 socks in your suitcase’, we would feel we were describing the product rather than offering higher-order benefits.

What turns the feature into more of a benefit is its novelty. At the time, music players with hard drives were relatively new, so having 1000 songs in your pocket was an arresting claim.

However, it’s still not really a benefit. We can chase it down a lot closer to the customer’s heart. Why is it so good to have 1000 songs in your pocket? Because you can have music on the move, make tracks with tracks, a sound for every season, music for your mood, blah.

When is a feature not a feature?

The iPod could have been connected to the customer’s life and emotions in any number of ways, but it wasn’t. (Admittedly, the ‘silhouette’ TV ads did add more ‘experience’, while retaining the same line.)

Why not? Because to certain audiences, features are benefits. If you’re selling a new gadget to hipsters, ever-alert to cool new experiences, or early adopters who like to geek out over tech specs, features get their attention.

Knowledgeable audiences like this will translate the feature into benefits for themselves. There’s no need to be all up in their grill telling them why the product’s good. If you do, you’ll only insult their self-image as discriminating and intelligent consumers. Instead, you want to show rather than tell and let them join the dots.

The other great thing about features is that they’re honest, and that builds trust. You don’t stretch credibility by quoting facts and figures that are demonstrably true. But if you overreach with the emotive brand stuff, people will see straight through you.

She combs her hair

Staying with Apple, the range of iMac ‘flavors’ available was not really a benefit. After all, you could only choose one, and it was unlikely to tone in with your décor unless you painted your box-room lime green to match it (as I did). But to hipsters, designers and creatives, the fact that Apple had thought about the visual character of computer hardware for more than five minutes was enough to close the sale.

It’s not just tech that can be sold this way. If you were selling school uniform to pennywise parents, you might not get that much traction just by insisting that your stuff was ‘hard-wearing’. But if you mentioned it was made of tough polycotton with double-stitched seams, the credibility needle might move a bit.

To sum up, if you know for sure that the customer is literate in the features you’re describing, you might be better letting them infer the benefit rather than stating it. At times like those, features really do sell better than benefits.

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Comments (22)

  1. I tried to make this point – less eloquently – on another copywriter’s site the other day. He’d said ‘don’t write about a camera’s 14 megapixels – write about the the moment she said ‘I do’ and your heart soared’ or some such bollocks. I disagreed, saying that 14 megapixels told me all I needed to know, then went on to say how we can seriously overdo this benefits not features thing.

    But then I pressed the wrong button or something and my comment never appeared.

  2. Great post, Tom.

    To prove your point, my eyes lit up when I read “Neodymium transducer magnets,” even though I’m well aware that Apple headphones sound terrible.

    Sucker.

  3. Thanks for the kind words.

    Regarding 14 megapixels, you might also be impressed by that even if you don’t quite know what a megapixel is, or why having more of them is any good. If nothing else, it gives you the ammo to post-rationalise an emotional decision you’ve already made.

    I should probably keep quiet about the image contrasting a megapixel line with a ‘memories’ line that’s on my home page.

  5. Don’t tell my students this. It goes against everything I taught them in lecture 1. 😀

  6. The Apple ad breaks one of David Ogilvy’s cardinal rules: never put a full point after a headline. (‘People won’t read on.’) No wonder the ad failed miserably and Apple is no more.

  7. They’re still at it – in fact, I think that’s their house style. But, curiously, they didn’t put one after ‘Made by Apple in California’ on the ‘branding’ ads. A new direction?

  8. Good post. I probably heard “we’re selling the sizzle, not the steak” a rousing quarter million times when writing tech campaigns in the Silicon Valley in the 90s.

    I wasted a lot of breath explaining that — to the engineer wrestling with real production bottlenecks — a feature like “a sustained 30 wafers per hour throughput” was a massive benefit.

    In other words, starving man is perfectly capable of translating “steak” into “good food.”

    Like you said, features sell when they translate instantly to a benefit for your target audience, though this isn’t an excuse for laziness on the part of the writer. Ho-hum features — or those that don’t solve problems for the target audience — aren’t particularly effective selling tools, but then, neither is a false emotional appeal based on smoke and mirrors.

  9. Except in the case of cameras, megapixels are a feature without much benefit. It enabled manufacturers to compete on a big number, but it makes little practical difference to most buyers – which is why everyone has now rightly shifted to going on about lenses or low light or better-looking flash photos.

  10. Hi Tom, another great post – where do you find the time?!

    I think the line works because it actually shows the feature and the benefit. The benefit is that you can carry all that music around with you.

  11. Good post. I read the whole first half thinking, “but hang on! The first generation iPod didn’t sell very well!” But you’re right, they were trying to attract the geeks, early-adopters and Mac fans (dazzled by the 5 gig hard-drive, unconcerned they needed Firewire).

    Later generations were mass market, sold buckets and had adverts that were silhouettes dancing against coloured backgrounds. Certainly no numbers.

  12. Yes, that’s true Robert. The difference between 12, 14 and 16 megapix is barely noticeable. The point I was making, though, was more about trying to bolt a benefit onto a term that is well understood (even if, as you say, it’s also misunderstood). It’s like saying ‘the TV has a 42″ screen – meaning you’ll be able to see a bigger picture than with smaller televisions.’

    ‘Benefits not features’ is a great rule of thumb, but copywriters and clients alike should remember that we’re not all 12 and we don’t like being patronised.

  13. Yes, understood – it’s just that megapixels is a particular example where everyone competed on the wrong metric (if we care about genuine benefit, anyway).

    Also, Apple seem to think competing on numbers on features using terms that are well understood is below them. They do it occasionally (8-core, currently 64 bit), but not when they’re aiming at the mass market. Rather than compete on resolution as a feature, they’ll invent a completely new term (Retina Display). Amazing, really, a feature they get to *own*.

  14. I think that’s partly because they can count on adoring journalists to do all the number-crunching on their behalf, so they don’t have to stoop to acknowledging anything as grubby as an industry standard. If they were a new player, which is quite hard to imagine, they might have to meet the competition head-on a bit more.

  15. They still needed numbers for upgraders though. When the new iPod Shuffles came out, I didn’t give a toss that they were in different colours. I just wanted to know whether I got enough additional songs on there to make it worthwhile getting a new one. The benefit was well established for me; it was all about incrementally improving it.

  17. Thanks Vikki. Actually, I didn’t blog for several months earlier this year, because I had no ideas. When I do get an idea, I have to write it down or it just rattles around in my head…

  18. Thanks for the kind words. It all comes down to knowing whether the audience understands the feature – and, maybe, being prepared to miss out on reaching those who don’t.

  20. Thanks for the post, Tom. I agree 100% that “…to certain audiences, features are benefits.”

    Veteran copywriter Bob Bly made this point decades ago when he advised copywriters to delineate benefits to consumer audiences, but to denote features to B2B customers. Engineers, he notes, “want hard data on drain-source, voltage, power dissipation, input capacitance, and rise-and-fall time…not broad advertising claims about how the product helps save time and money or improves performance.”

    This reasoning extends beyond B2B customers, to all educated customers. I know this to be true in my niche–luxury products. For luxury customers, overt benefit-focused marketing can come off as ham handed. But instead, when copy evocatively describes relevant features–whether three-ply cashmere, sustainably sourced diamonds, or hand-stitched saddle leather–the knowledgeable customer gets the benefits conferred by association.

  21. Thanks for the comment, Lorraine. If possible, I think it’s always worth talking to the client about the typical conversations they have with customers. If they struggle to explain or communicate benefits, that’s where the effort needs to go. But if customers are in feature-comparison mode, it’s more of a question of presenting information as clearly as possible.

  22. Great post! I think these less-spoken points are very important. Dousing your readers (and potential customers) with ONLY benefits is much less powerful than selling on the features.

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