Sorry, but benefits-centred marketing won’t set you apart
It’s great to introduce people to your product by first talking about the benefits it offers. But to be blunt, the word is out on benefits-centred marketing, and it’s become a baseline requirement of the industry rather than something that will put you ahead of your competitors.
In coming posts, you’ll probably hear me talk a lot about “medium abstraction,” which is the layer of marketing that is neither the super broad (benefits-centred) or super-specific (features-centred description of product or service). The reason for this, quite frankly, is that it isn’t very hard to come up with a broad benefits statement or a clear description of product features. Where people differentiate their companies is at the layer where benefits and features meet.
Proponents of “benefits-centered” marketing will tell you that your descriptions of product features are too technical to appeal to a buyer right away. But what this advice can sometimes miss is that defining and communicating the benefits of your product/service is a much more difficult job than saying things like, “Make life easier” or “Crush your sales goals” or “Never be lonely again.”
While these lines might get someone’s initial attention, you then have to be more specific about how your product/service will actually achieve this benefit. In other words, you’ll have to talk about how platform integration is going to make life easier, or how research and consulting will help someone crush their sales goals, or something of the like.
It’s at this crucial moment where people often fall of a cliff and enter a 4–5 minute speech, thinking that they’ve been given permission to be long-winded because someone responded well to their initial statement of benefit. In other words, they travel directly from high abstraction to low abstraction without crossing the part of marketing that matters most, which is medium abstraction.
Take, for example, a law firm that does all kinds of great community work and corporate giving. Being involved in the community is one of the best ways a law firm can form positive associations in people’s minds. These associations might include “generous,” “giving,” or even “loyal.” But does giving back to the community communicate expertise? Does it communicate that this law firm offers the best representation in town?
This is where we get into the area where it’s important to understand the associations that have formed around your company and brand. In other words, having people hear your name and think warm, fuzzy thoughts simply isn’t good enough if it’s not appropriate to your brand. It can even work against you if these associations are carrying people away from what you actually do. And no matter what general feelings people associate with your brand, you need them to be feelings that reinforce what your product/service is actually trying to accomplish.
A law firm could pour $1M in the community tomorrow and run commercials on TV featuring cute puppies. While this might cause people to think warm thoughts when they hear the law firm’s name, it doesn’t mean those thoughts are reinforcing the right thing. Which brings me to a point that any marketing of a hard-to-describe or intangible good should remember…
Positive associations can be bad for your company if they’re carrying people away from what it is you actually do.
The next big takeaway is:
If you don’t actively manage the associations your company provokes in people’s minds, you will have them assigned to you.
If you want, you could conduct a brand study today to learn how people think of your organization. But not everyone wants to do this. I have honestly heard people turn down these studies because they (and I quote), “Don’t want to know the answer.” In other words, they don’t want to know how big the gap is between how they want their company to be seen and how it’s actually being seen. Think of this as the equivalent of a company hearing its voice on tape and thinking, “I don’t sound like that, do I?”
So what to do? Do you simply bombard people with reminders of what your core business is, regardless of the fact that only a small percentage of your audience will ever have use for it? Not really.
What you need to do is make sure that the layer of medium abstraction around your business — the nexus between your broad brand associations and the things you actually do — is as strong as possible, blending the general with the specific in a way that the super-broad and the super-specific can’t accomplish.
The reason this area offers so much opportunity for improvement is because it requires much more balancing than the levels of high and low abstraction. But if you nail it, you’ll put yourself ahead of everyone who doesn’t (which is most).
