Would it be fair to say that the message here is "Sell the benefits, not the features"?
Part of the issue is (for example): Do most people care about how many cores there are? That speaks to your point about benefits vs features.
But the other issue is: Do most people know what a core is?
This is often referred to as dumbing things down, but that's pretty condescending. The person you're "dumbing things down" for may be a chief surgeon at a major hospital, someone who is probably smarter and more accomplished than most of us. They just might not care to spend their mental energy on understanding computer technology, in much the same way that I don't much care to understand biology or medicine.
So when I say it's about "speaking the same language as your audience", I mean speaking in terms that relate to what's important to them. If you're selling to a mass audience, you have to speak in such a way that doesn't assume any expertise or interest in technology. You have to give them a reason to care.
Most people don't care about the thermal performance of their laptop. But they can probably relate to being annoyed by how loud the fan gets or how hot the machine gets on their lap. They can relate to having the battery die, waiting for apps to load, closing apps because the machine can't handle having so many things open, etc.
But you also have to provide justification for those benefits. It's not enough to say "it's quiet" or "never gets hot", because for a sizeable portion of your audience, they need to understand WHY it's quiet. Which means you still need to talk about the features.
All of which is to say that a better axiom than "sell the benefits, not the features", in my arrogant opinion, is "Meet people where they're at."
That's what makes good copywriting so hard. You have to write in such a way that meets your audience where they're at, without actually knowing where they're at, and without being so simplistic that you insult their intelligence.
Also note there are ways to circumvent the "without actually knowing where they're at" problem, that's why marketing funnels have been invented.
That's not true, the only reason technical people can overlook “sell the benefits, not the features” is that people (including, usually, the tech people that overlook it) do care about “artifacts”. Sometimes because they understand the domain well enough to understand the impact on function and benefit from the “artifact” and don't need someone else spinning a narrative about benefit for them, sometimes because the “artifact” itself is a status/aspirational item for them.
The actual lesson of “sell the benefits, not the features” is not “people care about results not artifacts”, but that motivating action in others who aren't inherently motivated to that action without effort on your part requires understanding their individual interests and providing a narrative connecting the action you desire with their interests. It is not a lesson about what people care about, but about what you need to do to get what you want once you understand what they care about.
That doesn't contradict, but actually supports the fact that people don't care about artifacts in themselves.
Either they understand the function/benefit and that's what they're looking for, or they want them for status/aspiration (which is just a special case of the former, since status and aspiration are other functions among many).
> The actual lesson of “sell the benefits, not the features” is not “people care about results not artifacts”, but that motivating action in others who aren't inherently motivated to that action without effort on your part requires understanding their individual interests
Yes, and their interests are the function and the results people get from the artifact.
>It is not a lesson about what people care about, but about what you need to do to get what you want once you understand what they care about.
Erm, yes. "Sell benefits, not features" is a piece of marketing advice telling you what to do to get results (like any piece of advice). That's missing the point.
The question is why does it work. And the reason it works is for the aforementioned reasons: people care about results and functions, not artifacts.
On the other hand, it's very easy to talk about benefits that no one really cares about. Or to talk about them in such a way that they don't see how it applies to them, or why it might be important or impactful in their lives.
So that's why I prefer my way of thinking over "benefits > features". To me, it's a more complete way of looking at it.
With regards to funnels, you're 100% correct of course. But they're not always available, and many different groups of people with different needs, interests, and beliefs can (and do) end up on the same funnel path. You can keep breaking your funnel into every more refined steps, to be as specific as possible, but then you run into the issue of people giving up because you've asked too much of them before asking for the sale.
For example, the landing pages for those M1 Macs. What would you do to make sure you know more about your audience before telling them about the product? Are you going to put a series of questionnaires ahead of the content? The content there has to work for pretty much everybody.
> On the other hand, it's very easy to talk about benefits that no one really cares about. Or to talk about them in such a way that they don't see how it applies to them, or why it might be important or impactful in their lives.
Can't disagree with that, but it seems to me that's a more general point about precision in communication than the benefit/feature dichotomy.
Note that "a benefit no one cares about" is almost by definition not a benefit. If you're talking about an aspect of the product the person you're talking to doesn't find valuable, it's not a benefit. But that doesn't mean you should talk about features. It means you don't understand where they find value.
> With regards to funnels, you're 100% correct of course. But they're not always available, and many different groups of people with different needs, interests, and beliefs can (and do) end up on the same funnel path. You can keep breaking your funnel into every more refined steps, to be as specific as possible, but then you run into the issue of people giving up because you've asked too much of them before asking for the sale.
> For example, the landing pages for those M1 Macs. What would you do to make sure you know more about your audience before telling them about the product? Are you going to put a series of questionnaires ahead of the content? The content there has to work for pretty much everybody.
Sure. In practice, some benefits will work better than others overall, or will account for most of the persuasive power of a given product. Once you've found that, optimizing for subsegments may or may not be the rational choice.
Note that a lot of that stuff done through marketing automation is invisible to a lot of people. Apple, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't do a lot of it, but they could easily target their users based on all the information they collect on them over time without asking for information directly.
I would really love to see, what ideas Apple discarded. Afterwards it seems obvious, the benefits. ;)
“The new MacBook Air. Even we say it has no fans”?