People who work in sales and marketing are trained to think in terms of benefits, and rightly so. While features may tell us about a product or service, they inform more than they motivate; buyers are motivated by benefits.
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Here’s a simple multiple choice question most branding consultants can’t answer: Which of the following are good reasons to rebrand your organization?
(a) We’re tired of hearing our own positioning statements and we fear the brand is getting stale
(b) Our logo has been around for decades, and besides, we’ve brought on a new management team
(c) The competition just updated their position and we’re afraid, if we don’t change, we’ll be left in the dust
(d) A change in strategy will help us leverage changes in the marketplace or our offerings
(e) All of the above are good reasons to rebrand Read more
We recently reread Adam Morgan’s classic Eating the Big Fish: How Challenger Brands can Compete against Brand Leaders. First published in 2000, Big Fish was ahead of its time. Eleven years ago, there was no Google, no iPod, no YouTube, no Facebook. Yet, Morgan spoke in brave new terms about taking on the market leader with unconventional, mind-share-grabbing techniques – like viral marketing.
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Long before blogs, before desktop publishing, before offset printing, before movable type… we communicated through manuscripts and scrolls. Back then, writing mattered. Authors were philosophers, historians, poets and scholars. Today, not so much.
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As the NBA championship game approaches, we find ourselves musing, once again, on the relationship between branding and roundball.
Like we said last week, teamwork is essential to victory. But so are the fundamentals. So let’s take a brief time-out to draw a few parallels between the basketball fundamentals and building a winning brand: Read more
Great brands, like great basketball teams, are built on cooperation and a commitment to mutual success. And both can be shattered by the actions of just one player. In basketball, five individuals work as one unit to drive a 9-inch ball down a 94-foot court and place it through an 18-inch hoop ten feet in the air. Each player has a chance to excel – to be the best at his game – but in the end, what sets winning teams apart is their ability to work together, carefully executing plays that orchestrate fluid exchanges between players to create an opening for one player to make the shot.
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By using features, advantages, and benefits, marketers focus the buyer’s attention on very different things. Features focus on the product by pointing out facts, but facts alone are seldom compelling. Advantages focus the buyer’s attention on the competition, but such comparisons are only useful if the buyer is familiar with the competitor. (And who wants to focus the buyer’s attention on the competition, anyway?) Benefits explain the value of a product or service in terms of its ability to meet the buyer’s needs. They focus the buyer on himself, and self is what matters most, to most people. Yet despite the obvious differences between features, advantages, and benefits, many people still have difficulty sorting them out. One helpful mnemonic is to associate them with three classic television ads…
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On April 17, 1961, New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf released the first full edition of Rosser Reeves’ seminal book Reality in Advertising, in which Reeves detailed the theory of USP. Based on more than two decades of research at his world-renown advertising agency Ted Bates & Company (Reeves had been Bates’ creative partner), Reeves argued that advertising campaigns were far more likely to be successful if they offered the buyer a “Unique Selling Proposition.” Each advertising campaign should center around a specific buyer benefit – one that is unique to that particular brand.
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On March 1, 2011, a popular public relations website posted an article based on previously published research, claiming “70 percent of local-business owners market on Facebook.” The headline was shocking, the content equally bold, and the dialog that followed typical of the hype surrounding social media. Read more
Did you ever notice how often business people trot out opinion surveys as if they were plausible grounds for forecasting? “Our customers tell us they intend to spend more on equipment in 2012… Human Resource managers say they expect hiring to increase in coming months… The majority of professional fundraisers believe the recent slowdown in giving will turn around sharply next year… 72% of admissions counselors surveyed are anticipating a spike in enrollment, based on continued job insecurity…” And on the basis of statistics like these, we are supposed to make business decisions. Really?
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