Underscore your Product?s Benefits and Features.

[M.M. Hasan Parvez]

Products sell because of good marketing and a solid sales pitch. Good marketing and sales pitches come from people who understand the product. No, I don?t mean knowing exactly why things work the way they do or what part performs what function. Understanding the product involves knowing what it does, how well it does it in comparison to the competition, and what it can do that other products on the market don?t. Or, in a saturated market, what it can do well that other products don?t do so well.

And what, you in the back row with the funny hat ask, are the critical pieces of information for that part? Knowing the product?s benefits and its features, for starters.

What is a benefit? A benefit is the most critical part of a product, because a benefit is basically what the product does. This is what the product does or gives to the person who bought it. This is what it was put on the market for.

On the other hand, a feature is not a benefit. A feature is an add-on or a detail that gets added on top of the benefit that helps set the product apart. These aren?t essential, but they can help make a brand more appealing to a specific subset of the target market. Different people look for different things, even when buying the same type of product. Having features that appeal to all those different strokes can broaden the product?s ability to be sold.

Basic marketing principles tell us that the benefit should be emphasized first, but not overly so. Ads should always show what a product does at the grass-roots level. From there, we work on introducing the features, making sure to connect them to the benefit. This is common sense, since telling people that your product does something without connecting it to what it is supposed to be doing makes no sense at all.

For example, you have headache medication. Alright; simple and clean, something people will know. Then you tell people it?s been micronized. Most people will have no idea what that means, and if they don?t know what it is, then it won?t matter to them when decision time comes. You have to give a really simple explanation of what micronization is ? a process that makes the drug?s particles more stable and better absorbed by the body ? and how that makes the benefit better than products that don?t have it.

Benefits and features are both part of a good advertising strategy and marketing campaign. One helps define the product and determines what the target market in general is. The other helps show off what makes your product better than the rest and can help target specific parts of a market.