On 18:56:40 25 November 2008 DougKessler wrote:

We're having some trouble convincing clients that they need to think harder about how they describe their benefits.... ie, how they go about doing better positioning and message development.  I put a paper together on the subject to try and explain.  What do you think.  Have we nailed it?  Or are clients destined to talk nonsense, all of the time!

http://www.velocitypartners.co.uk/2008/11/25/tech-benefits-recipes-for-corporate-positioning-and-corporate-message-development/
 

Hi Doug,

I started to read your paper and I stopped part way through. No business owner will really read the document it's too long.

When people struggle with benefits versus features I always ask them to say "which means that" after anything they think is a benefit to make sure it's useful for their clients.

As an example let's say there's a new cutting machine that has a new feature of a big red stop button. If we say "it has a big red stop button which means that..." as a silly example "it's easily found if someone's head is being dragged towards the laser cutter and so reduces employee loss and subsequent court costs!

So asking them to give you a list of features you can demonstrate this in action with them and it will click.

Jim

Marketing Evangelist
Blog: http:/www.business-powerpack.com

Harvard Business Review did a recent article on value propositions and it's very good on the difference between benefits and features.

http://www.supersmous.co.za/DownloadFiles/QuadS-HBR-value-propositions.pdf

hiya, Doug,

I like the structure of the article, pictures, etc, but I think it would do better if you took some of your own advice. You talk about the 'benefits' of focussing on benefits but you don't offer any proof. ie you need to add some stuff lower down to make it more credible.

just my opinion though!

daniel

Hi Doug,
I found your article a couple of weeks ago and read it several times. I liked the basic flow of arguments and decided to try it on a customer, a company developing software for B2B ecommerce. They had great diffilculty of getting out of the technotrap and create a way to communicate in a meaningfull to clients and prospects.

I liked having a framework to get some structure in the process. It took some time to tweak the model. The feature part seemed easy, but was not. I only wanted meaningfull features i.e. features that the competetion was not offering. That was a rewarding job in itself because it created a fresh perspective for the guys developing the software. The second level of specific benefits and the big befenits led us in a series of uselfull interviews. My core objective was to get rid of all generic statements and only figure out real day to day befeits for the people we're trying to address. That created a lot of very specific benefits and  I was glad we could drop all the general bull. Currently we're working on the specific or process benefits, also trying to make this as specific as possible. Not so easy.

The next phase is to tie these features/benefits to a communication strategy where we develop a framework for communicating the right stuff to the right people at the right time. This ads a time dimension to the framework which will make it even more powerfull.

So, thank's for the groundwork. It's been very helpfull.

Kai