Comment by ouid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ouid | Hacker News Reader

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>So, it seems like features are the “what” of your product or service, while benefits are the “why” behind it. I also found a really neat, old marketing quote that’s often attributed to Theodore Levitt (he attributes it to Leo McGinneva in this paper), on why people buy quarter-inch drill bits:
"They don’t want quarter-inch bits. They want quarter-inch holes."
So, the customer wants to make a quarter-inch hole for some reason. They buy a quarter-inch bit for their drill in order to achieve this. Marketing the drill bit based on its features (it fits into your drill) wouldn’t be as successful in this case as marketing it based on the benefits (you can create a quarter-inch hole).
So after all of this reading, I finally distilled the difference into a sentence that I think makes it easy to distinguish between features and benefits:

A feature is what your product does; a benefit is what the customer can do with your product.

If a feature is what a product does, then isn't making quarter inch holes a feature of drill bits?

It's not perfect though. If you make a brochure full of quarter-inch holes, a customer still won't buy your bits.

I think in one of the two Steve Jobs movies the Pepsi guy explained it quite well: He shows how people open a Pepsi, drink it, and then feel whatever is important to them. What you need to do is actually present your features, but in a way that the customer believes he can achieve his benefits easily with it. Of course to be able to do that, you first need to understand the benefits the customer cares about.

1. present technical features -> be seen as weird nerd.

2. present benefits -> be seen as glitchy sales guy.

3. present features that let customer think about benefits -> sell products.

> 3. present features that let customer think about benefits -> sell products.

I see this trend and it actually makes me furious. If I want to buy a GPU, I want to see the stats and how it compares to other products, not how many headshots i can make with that particular GPU.

I'll see these ads on billboards, on tv etc and think of the greasy marketing people that want to trick me into buying their stuff.

If the ads are to obnoxious I'll actually make an effort to avoid that brand ( looking at you Apple and Coca-Cola)

Arguably, that's not a problem with the type of marketing, it's just that they shouldn't be showing them to you, but to people who don't know that a new GPU can improve their gaming experience.

It's one of the most annoying things with ad targeting: even if you let them spy on your whole life, it's still so fucking terrible at actually showing relevant ads.

I would call this a mix of consumerism and marketing failures.

People used to buy CPUs based on how many Mhz they advertised, but Mhz is just a proxy for what you really care about: performance. This resulted in sub-optimal CPUs like the Pentium 4.

At the same time, I don't see why anyone would trust a "headshot" benchmark; that seems too subjective. For gaming, consistently high frame-rates of accurately rendered scenes might be a goal; GFLOPS is just a proxy.

I honestly feel like Pepsi and GPUs fall into different categories. With Pepsi, the customer usually already knows what it does for you so explaining the benefits isn't as important. So instead do telling customers what they already know, they associated good feelings with their product. A GPU is different in that different GPUs perform significantly differently so explaining the stats is much more important to a buyer.

> With Pepsi, the customer usually already knows what it does for you ...

make you fat?

(I love pepsi :-) )

I'm not a marketer, but I think there are some important differences worth examining here...

First, there is clearly a big difference between marketing to a technical crowd like HN, and marketing to the general public. Also, marketing products that are 99.9% similar will probably be bused on non-technical features exactly because the products are so similar.

Also, I think benefits are more broad and emotional. For example, a lot of auto ads are clearly about how a certain car will, for example, get you laid. Or at least get you an attractive female companion. that's the benefit. Not that it is more reliable, or scores higher in Consumer Reports ratings. The HN crowd is more technical, so puts more value in Consumer Reports ratings, but many people don't actually care. They may think they do, but, when it comes to actually spending money, they don't.

GPU vendors presumably should have game titles that are co-promoted so a prospective customer would know that a) they'll want a good GPU for game/title and b) if they buy this GPU they can expect baseline usability for a that game or game-equivalents.

Why else does someone buy a GPU? Given the niche market, the generic consumer positioning may not make as much sense.

Yeah, a GPU producer advertising to you should not list the headshots (benefits) but present its stats (features) in a way that you can consider yourself which benefits you gain from buying it.

You show the benefits to convince someone they need a product of this kind. Then, for the discerning customer, you show features to convince them they need your specific product.

3. Present (business) outcomes. It depends on who you are working with and all three approaches can be appropriate for a single deal, but varies based on the audience. Generally I see technical salespeople that refuse to think beyond specs, and sales that get trained on business outcomes and can't shutup about KPIs and NPVs to a technical buyer. It is painful on all sides these days.

"A thousand songs in your pocket"

Which lets you think about listening all songs you like wherever you go. The benefit is listening to your songs. "1000 songs" is a feature (size) represented to entice imagination.

1. nerd feature: 10 Gig MP3 Player (I don't know what was the measure back then or how much a song takes, replace with whatever is a reasonable number)

2. benefit: listen to all your songs everywhere

3. presenting features to entice imagination: 1000 songs in your pocket.

> 3. present features that let customer think about benefits -> sell products.

i.e., manipulate them psychologically to believe that the product is very suitable (when in reality, it may be a piece of shit).

No, a feature of a drill bit are the hard-alloy super-sharp perfectly aligned cutting edges.

The drill bit by itself does not make holes. You can use it (combined with another tool) to make holes.

A feature is something that the product itself does, not what you can do with the product.

No, a feature of a drill bit are the hard-alloy super-sharp perfectly aligned cutting edges.

Sure, but I only actually care about those features to the extent they affect my ability to make holes.

>If a feature is what a product does, then isn't making quarter inch holes a feature of drill bits?

I would say yes, and the benefit with the drill would be final product the user is building.

"They don't want quarter-inch holes. They want to build a playset for their kids."

"Making quarter inch holes" is a feature, yes, but the benefit goes beyond that... picture a quarter inch drill bit that just drilled the hell out of everything, driied at the perfect location, drilled to the perfect depth, never needed sharpening, looked better, made you look better, made your coworkers respect you, and made your boss happy to give you a big raise. Now, wouldn't that drill bit be worth a few extra bucks?

Think faces. The feature is a nose. The benefit of a nose is that you can smell stuff. The advantage that confers on you is that you don't get sick from eating spoiled meat.

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