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Ten questions to ask when you need to understand and communicate your product's benefits Here is a back issue of Marketing Booster, the email newsletter that Richard Groom writes and sends free every fortnight to subscribers. You can subscribe here or read over 60 back issues using the back issues index page. The marketing experts are always telling us that we need to talk about the benefits of our products or services when communicating with customers. It's not the only thing to mention, but in most cases it's probably the right thing to do. If you're new to understanding what we really mean by benefits, let me take broadband as an example. The benefits are that you can surf the internet and talk at the same time, that you can see more web pages in a hour when you are gathering information, that you can add more songs to your music collection, that in the long run it's cheaper as you won't be making long dial-up calls, and so on. Note that there's nothing in there about the technical performance of broadband. Technical performance in itself isn't a benefit: it's what it means to the customer that matters. But I find that it can sometimes be hard to identify the benefits of certain products. I have seen clients scratch their heads during long silences when asked to describe what makes their products different from those offered by competitors. So it would help if we had some kind of checklist to help us get 'inside' the benefits of our products or services. That's what I've come up with for this article: a failsafe tool to identify the benefits. (It builds on other techniques mentioned in previous Marketing Booster articles and covered on my copywriting workshops.) I've looked at the benefits I have been writing about on a number of products and services recently and have identified ten categories in which they fall. So by writing a question to cover each category I created a tool that you can use, either in brainstorming sessions or when working by yourself. Here are the questions (for 'product' you can also read 'service'): 1. What will customers be able to do after buying the product that they can't do now? 2. Will the product save customers some time? 3. Will the product save customers some money? 4. Will the product give customers more choice? 5. How will the product help customers to avoid or reduce risks? 6. How will the product make life easier for the customer? 7. How will the product improve the end results of using it? 8. How will the product get results more quickly than before? 9. How can the product be customised to meet each customer's precise needs? 10. How is buying the product from you more convenient than buying from someone else? This list of questions is by no means exhaustive but it should help to better identify the benefits of products or services. One extra thing to add: not all benefits will be seen as important by all customers. As Philip Kotler explains in 'Kotler on Marketing': "Benefit segmentation means grouping people who are seeking a similar benefit; for example, there are buyers who seek a low price, others who seek high product quality, and still others who seek excellent service." It might be useful, therefore, to take the list of benefits that arise from using this tool and do some work to work out which benefits apply to which customer segments. Copyright 2005 Richard Groom |