Stop Communicating All Those Benefits ...

by on 26 March, 2006 - 12:16

by: Alain Thys

In communication they always a claim that less is more.  And this little gem on what would happen if the iPod got the Microsoft treatment definitely proves the point.  Yet how far do you cut back?  When you have 100 features to communicate, where do you focus?

Our first temptation to get around this problem is often to simply communicate all the benefits we can think of … the more the merrier.   I remember sales training sessions where we spent half a day looking at flipcharts, trying to come up with yet another reason why customers should buy our product.

The only problem with this approach is information indigestion, leading your customer to simply “tune out”. 

Some get around this by focusing only the benefits that make their product or service compare favorably to its nearest alternative, yet this is clearly still just a half-way solution.

A concept I really like a lot is to focus on what Anderson, et al. call “resonating focus”.  Here you work on the assumption that who ever is buying is both smart and pressed for time.  As a result you focus your message completely on “the one or two points of difference (and perhaps a point of parity) whose improvements will deliver the greatest value to the customer for the foreseeable future.”  

In short, you only focus your communication on what is most worthwhile to remember when considering your offer.  And while the authors only claim this is relevant for business markets, I would say it works for most of us consumers as well. 

The only tricky part is to really understand what matters to your customer.  Which gets us back to the iPod example at the start of this post.  

 PS.  A big thank you to Professor Horst Bender for pointing me to this concept.