Benefits vs. Features

What are you marketing? Benefits or Features?

The question sounds simple. That answer is not so simple.

You probably know the difference between benefits and features.

If you are selling a car the feature might be that it is available in candy apple red, sky blue, moss green or charcoal gray.

The benefit might be that you can look sexy in red, cool in blue, inviting in green or mysterious in gray.

The lesson was hammered home for me a few decades ago in my first career. I was representing my employer, International Harvester at the International Plowing match. I was on tractor displays. My job was to explain all the features of the new tractors to the farmers.

I had memorized the details of the tractors – horsepower, PTO power, tire options, etc. I even prepared some cue cards with this information in case I forgot.

But I was jolted into realty when some farmer with crooked teeth stared at me after my dissertation about horsepower and said, “Can she pull a three-furrow plow in sandy clay?”

The question shocked me. I didn’t know the answer. And I realized that that was the important question. I didn’t know the answer and the company had not prepared me for it. They had given me facts – not relevance.

If you don’t know what is important to your customers, you will be talking about horsepower – when they are worried about getting stuck in the clay.

Find out about the clay. Talk about the clay. Other than the engineer that designed it, who cares about horsepower? It’s all about the clay.


George Torok
Stuck in the Clay

http://www.powermarketing.ca/