Features Tell, Benefits Sell

Tale of Two Dealerships

Last week my uncle and I were looking around for a car. We went to two dealerships in Kuching which sold the Perodua. At the first dealership, we were given adequate attention. The sales executive did his best to convince me - a non-auto enthusiast. Tell me about chrome wheels, sporty body, and spoilers if you want to receive a blank stare. That was what the sales executive in the second dealership did. On top of that, he was telling my uncle and I how hard it is to secure the car loan. Even if we could pay for the car by cash, he said, is still hard. It is as if he was deterring the purchase!

Mind you: at both dealerships, I was looking for the exact same model after some convincing at the first dealership.

Anyway, chances are most customers are not interested in the features per se. True, there are some tech/spec enthusiasts. RPM, RAMs, Processors, and Engines would excite these people. But I suspect most consumers are like me: clueless. All we know - and care about - is our end-user experience with the product or service.

Take laptops/notebooks for example. There are a multitude of brands and types on sale: tablets, the small notebooks, the gaming notebook, a macbook air. A person who will use the laptop for purely paperwork and presentation purposes would not care if it has 4GB of RAM. 1GB of RAM would be more than enough to run the latest Microsoft Office applications. However, 1GB RAM on a 10-inch laptop on Intel Atom would be utterly useless to a professional graphic designer who needs the laptop to create elaborate designs on the many Adobe softwares.

Features & Benefits

When looking at the engine capacity, the RPM, the RAM, and the processor, we are looking at the features. I am not saying the features are unimportant. What I am saying is that most consumers would have a hard time translating the features on their own. That is where the benefits come in.

These days when I search for a Notebook, I tell the sales person what I am using it for. Here is what I actually said:

I am looking for a laptop which I will use to play games, run Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, and do video rendering using Sony Vegas. These are what I will use the laptop for, on top of the word processing and Internet surfing activities.

That is how I ended with my present laptop. A Toshiba Satelite with a 4GB RAM, which I upgraded to 8GB, running on Windows 7, having a Raden AMD Graphics Card as well as a Core i5 3rd generation processor.

What does this have to do with you, the copywriter?

Always remember that a Copywriter's job is no different from a sales person. In fact, copywriters are sales people behind the laptop! (The quote I got from Bob Bly's book was Copywriters are the saleman behind the typewriter).

It doesn't matter if you are an in-house copywriter or a freelancer. Whether you are writing for print, broadcast or the Internet, the principle is the same: copywriters sell from behind the laptop!

You might be selling a gadget. The gadget's benefits are what would persuade customers. Take the Samsung SIII and the iPhone 5. Both were announced at the same time. But what are the differences in functions of the two products. Yet, how is it possible that both are selling at roughly the same rate?

So when you next sit down to write that copy, or brainstorm the look & feel, remember: Features Tell, Benefits Sell.