"Features tell, benefits sell" is an unhelpful myth

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One popular marketing cliche is that "features tell, benefits sell."

It's pretty straightforward. The features of your product or service tell people what it is and does. The benefits, on the other hand, convince people to buy it. 

Sounds great! But it's not always true. And when it is true, it's a bit more complicated than a four-word cliche. Here's why: 

Sometimes features do sell! 

Everyone who reads your copy is at a different stage of awareness. A stage of awareness is a way of categorising your audience in terms of how much they know about the problem your product solves and the benefits of your product. 

The later someone's stage of awareness, the closer they are to buying what you have to sell. 

I've written about this in more depth elsewhere, but for our purposes, the below summary should be enough:

The closer someone is to the bottom of this awareness funnel, the more relevant features are going to be. 

For example, take someone in the second-to-last bucket on the graphic. 

They're aware of the problem you solve and the benefits you provide. Now they just need to compare the features you offer against the features a competitor offers. 

At this stage, the worst thing you can do is present people with a bunch of benefits. That's not what they're looking for!

And if you won't provide them with the information they need to make a decision, they're going to take their business to someone who will.
 

What are benefits, anyway?

The other problem with this piece of conventional wisdom is that it collapses every product into service into two elements: a feature, and its accompanying benefit. 

This is not actually the case. In reality, every feature is accompanied by a zillion different kinds of benefits. There are concrete benefits for people towards the bottom of the awareness funnel, and more broad, emotional benefits for people up towards the top. 

These benefits are going to look very different - even though they're describing the same features. 

For example, my Honda Jazz is very fuel efficient, thanks to features like its small engine, chassis and body. For someone close to the bottom of the awareness funnel, that's a benefit statement in and of itself. 

But someone close to the top of the funnel is going to need a completely different benefit statement. They're not thinking about cars, so "fuel efficient" doesn't have much meaning. They need that benefit to be described in terms that affect their life. 

So you could say something about the fact that the Jazz is better for the environment, or that owning one saves you petrol costs. 

And the further up that funnel you go, the more abstract your benefit statement can become.

In the upper layers, you find things like Apple's "think different" campaign, or Nike's "just do it" - benefit statements that don't mention computers or shoes at all, because they're trying to connect with people who aren't even thinking about the problems these products solve. 

My point is, "benefits" aren't just the flip side of features. If you conflate them into a binary opposition, you'll end up describing things in terms of their immediate benefit - your product's equivalent of fuel efficiency.  

That might be fine, but if you're talking to people who are in a less-heightened stage of awareness, your copy is going to be talking about something those people aren't that interested in. 

In other words, not that persuasive. 
 

It's a myth! 

So next time someone tells you "features tell and benefits sell," tell them (politely) that they're wrong. In reality, good marketing and copywriting is more than following a pithy little cliche.

Rather, it's a matter of deeply understanding your audience and serving them up the information they need to make a decision. 

That might be features, that might be benefits, it might be a combination of the two. It might be wide, emotional benefits or it might be highly specific benefits. Or it might be somewhere in between. It's entirely dependent on what your audience cares about and their stage of awareness. 

Take a look at the copy you're using now. Is it targeted at the right stage of awareness? If not, let me know - I'll help you fix it. 

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