The benefits of a product are all-important--I should say the
perceived benefits are all-important. Calvin Klein isn't
selling perfume. He's selling sex. Year after year,
Coca-Cola's advertising drummed variations of the word
refresh--refreshes, refreshing, refreshed, refreshment--into
the American psyche. Coke owned a benefit that almost all of us
feel a need for from time to time.
One of the most common mistakes marketers make is that they
communicate the features of a product rather than the benefits.
Imagine the results if Coke's advertising slogan had been
"the pause that's cold and wet" rather than "the
pause that refreshes."
A feature is something that the folks in the research and
development department get excited about. A benefit is something
that excites the buyer. A feature is what a product does; a benefit
is what a product does for me.
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British comedian John Cleese made a training film for
salespeople that illustrates the folly of trying to sell features
rather than benefits. Cleese portrays a surgeon who is explaining
an upcoming procedure to an anxious patient lying in a hospital
bed.
"Have I got an operation for you," Cleese begins
eagerly. "Only three incisions and an Anderson slash, a
Ridgeway stubble-side fillip and a standard dormer slip! Only five
minutes with the scalpel; only thirty stitches! We can take out up
to five pounds of your insides, have you back in your hospital bed
in 75 minutes flat, and we can do 10 of them in a day.
"Shall I put you down for three?"
Cleese's surgeon has a demonstrably superior product.
He's talking to a customer who is interested in what it could
do for him. But all the customer discovers is that after a gory
surgical procedure, he'll be right back where he started. In
the hospital bed. What he wants to know is when he'll be
playing golf again.
Put your customers on the golf course.
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