The Power of Benefits: How to Make Your Ads Irresistible to Your Customers

When I was preparing today’s blog post, after reading replies from our last blog post. I realised there was a need to clearly discuss the existing differences between features and benefits.

In the last blog post, we mainly centred our discussion on the benefits of communicating a service’s or brand’s benefits instead of features, but we were unable to clearly discuss the differences between features and benefits.

To understand, let us take an example from Denny Hatch who in 2014 explained the differences by drawing an example from the insurance industry to explain the differences as follows:

“If you buy a $1 million life insurance policy, you are promised that your heirs will receive a benefit of $1 million when you die.”

From the above statement, the phrase “you will receive a benefit of $1 million when you die” is not as futuristic as you first thought; it’s a feature of the policy. Thus, for an insurance company to convert many customers using the above advertisement statement, it should have said:

“You can sleep soundly knowing that if something happens to you, your family will be okay. They can keep the house, pay the bills, and will always remember you with love and appreciation.”

In the above statement, the insurance company’s explanation of the feature of an insurance company provides the background under which we can define the two terms as follows: a future is a descriptive fact about a product or service; it’s what the product is or has; while a benefit is what a product does, or, in other words, what a customer gains as a result of the future.

Therefore, to ensure that your products or services’ perform well in markets, your teams in advertising and selling should avoid using the “Bells and Whistle Approach” when performing their duties to ensure they reach their targets and your company’s make massive profits through their products or services.