Features or Benefits?
November 5, 2009 by yelena
Filed under Burning Questions, blog
Q: What’s the difference between features of my service/product and its benefits to my clients.
A: Lately I’ve read several posts in big-name blogs about the differences between features and benefits. They all pretty much agreed that what customers look for are not so much features, but benefits. The difference between the two, it seems, is the fact that the later create value and the former create filler for your Products/Services page. Or something to that effect.
Jason Alba wrote about feature-rich and benefit-rich LinkedIn profiles.
Michael Fortin posted repeatedly and at length about the FAB formula (features, advantages, benefits) and about making a mistake of talking up your product’s features instead of describing how customers benefit from using your product.
Jacob Morgan provided some excellent step-by-step on how to use online tools to build a benefits list supported by existing features.
Still, it was a bit hard to digest without proper examples from daily living (the IttyBiz post on this issue was an exception with lots of examples).
But a few days ago I had a first-hand experience of this features vs. benefits issue and from the customer side to boot. I stayed at a hotel. Ok, nothing remarkable so far. Well, when I was choosing a hotel online, I kept coming across Room Amenities pages. You know, the ones that list all the standard stuff – the coffee maker, high-speed Internet, etc. Well, the hotel I booked listed 32″ flat-screen high-def TVs in every room as their top feature.
As I unpacked and relaxed on a (very comfortable) bed, I flipped through the channels on this said TV and found NOTHING of interest (because the hotel did not carry the full cable lineup). When I realized that the hotel did not offer ANY of my favorite cable channels, I finally got the point of the whole features vs. benefits issue.
The room had a nice feature that carried absolutely no benefit to me personally. I suspect that I wasn’t alone (hey, they didn’t have Comedy Central OR HGTV!).
Have you had a features vs. benefits experience as a customer? As a business owner, do you emphasize features, benefits or feature-supported benefits in your web copy?
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