Chris Brogan has a good point in his latest post ‘Sell Benefits Not Features’.
It’s important that we learn how to talk in terms of benefits and not the features. (…) It’s not the various features that convince someone to buy. They might influence your purchase, but you buy benefits.
I couldn’t agree more.
This is not a new ‘mistake’. It’s a very old one. At the start of major industrialisation in the United States advertising concentrated on features and not benefits as well.
Old time advertising
Originally uploaded by Swarup108
Products were being advertised in a descriptive manner, trumpeted as the new scientific miracle, the latest success of the industrial era. New products had to be ‘explained’, their technical features understood. One of the (many) reasons for this was that the products were thought of from the engineer’s point of view. This is exactly what is happening today. Twitter, Facebook etc. are being thought of from the programmers’ point of view or at least the point of view of tech savvy people.
So advertising kept going at it from the ‘science’ (or at times pseudo – science) point of view until at some point the industrialists (and the government) became worried that soon demand would not be enough for the level of production. Enter the psychologists (Ernest Dichter being a shining example) who saw the Truth: One car is very much like another car. But a Ford says something different about you than a Cadillac. So you don’t sell a car. You sell a lifestyle associated with your car’s brand.
Do we really think that the ‘lifestyle’ approach is too far for new and social media? All we need to do is wait for the time that demand will not be enough. And then the games shall begin once more. I just hope they don’t get as dirty.
