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Why Feature-Selling Fails

When customers buy your product or service, what exactly are they buying? Are they buying the features that you offer, or are they buying something else, something you may never have mentioned in any of your marketing and advertising material?

The most effective advertisements often never mention features. The Apple iPod has become one of the most ubiquitous products on the market today; it has numerous competitors, many of whom constantly promote their features, not to mention their cheaper price, yet the iPod dominates the field and their commercials are basically entertainments that ignore features altogether: what Apple is selling is the endorphin-producing experience of having your favorite music available anytime you want it; once the consumer buys into the experience, it is merely a question of which iPod to choose. The decision concerning features is secondary to the decision to buy the experience. So if selling the experience works so well for Apple and countless other consumer product companies, why wouldn't it work for you?

"Everybody Lies"
- Hugh Laurie as Dr. Gregory House

The biggest obstacle for business-to-business companies to overcome in marketing their products and services through experience-inducing advertising is fear. There is a certain false-comfort in selling logic to prospects, and of course if you ask a customer why they purchased X or Y, they are bound to give you a logical feature-based answer, but like my favorite television doctor says, "all patients lie," and I believe the same can be said for prospects. Wasn't this one of the major lessons learned by the Ford Motor Company when they built the Edsel based on consumer-requested features? And we all know what happened to the Edsel.

"The Only Thing We Have To Fear Is Fear Itself"
- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Let's face it, after spending a good part of your business life creating the best product or service at the best possible price, to then say, now I am going to sell it by never mentioning any of the features, is for most people, an impossible concept to wrap their heads around. But then that's one of the reasons why some companies make it big, while other don't. If Joe Boxer and Victoria's Secret sold underwear based on thread-count, how many boxers and bras do you think they would sell; or if your favorite lipstick manufacturer touted the quality of their beeswax and plant-stain formulae, how well do you think they would do? Yet companies continue to promote feature enhancements as if they where the answer to increased sales and marketing success.

Features Motivate Prospects To Comparison Shop

The trouble with promoting features is that it motivates prospects to comparison shop and no matter what features you offer today, you can be sure your competitors have better ones just waiting to be dumped on the market, making your stuff inferior by comparison. And when the feature battles reach their version of a cold-war stalemate, the only thing left to compete on is price, and that is a place few companies really want to go.

'The Paradox of Choice'

Barry Schwartz, psychology professor at Swarthmore College and author of the book, 'The Paradox of Choice' points out that, "People can't ignore options - they have to pay attention to them. If they make a choice, is there another choice that would have been better? There's more effort put into making decisions, and less in enjoying them. What's nagging is the possibility that, if they had chosen differently, they could have gotten something better." The bottom-line is the more choice and features you offer prospects, the more you confuse them, making it less likely they buy anything. Too many options paralyze a customer's ability to make a decision.

As result of this 'Paradox of Choice,' many websites, advertisements, and marketing campaigns are actually counter-productive because they confuse prospects with features that clients did not know existed, and would probably never use.

Nobody likes to feel that they made a bad choice. Feature escalation only plants doubts in consumers' minds and stops them from buying a product they were primed and ready to buy for fear of not making the best choice. Cell phone and digital camera manufacturers seem to take this feature-frenzy-marketing to a whole new level when all their clients really want to do is communicate with friends and take nice pictures of their family. What you are marketing has to be in synch with what the prospect is really buying.

The New Marketing Battleground - The Web

In the past, major corporations with their big advertising budgets were the only ones who had the ability to mount high-profile campaigns on television and radio and in mass circulation magazines and newspapers, but things have changed. Enter, the Web, the great equalizer, where anybody with imagination, a few bucks, and some guts can make a big marketing splash if they know how to go about using the new medium to their advantage.

High-quality Web-based presentations and commercials that tell entertaining, memorable, experience-inducing stories that relates to prospects' emotional fulfillment is the way to attract attention and generate leads. If you want to use the Web effectively you have to understand the psychology of what attracts people's attention, and what kind of information they retain in memory and why.

Accessing The Human Memory Bank

Putting Things in Context

When you tell someone a story, you put the information in context and at the same time you supply memory triggers that help people recall the information. Perhaps this would be best illustrated by a story.

My wife and I were trying to recall the name of a movie. We knew it was a sci-fi flick and it starred Charlton Heston and the plot involved an apocalyptic biological war where Charlton Heston was the only plague-free person left on earth, but for the life of us we could not remember the name of the movie, which was not surprising since we saw the movie when it was released in 1971. All evening we tried to remember what it was called but we finally gave up. My wife decided to go to bed, when all of a sudden I heard her yelling at the top of her lungs, "The Omega Man, The Omega Man!" This revelation came when she removed her watch - not an Omega. The only reference she had to an Omega watch was one that I had not worn in years, but had worn when we were married. Her brain put 'watch + husband + brand association + movie storyline' together and she was able to come up with the correct movie title - the mind works in mysterious ways, ways that can be harnessed by clever, creative, story-based marketing.

Drawing Upon Familiar Examples

People may not remember all the bells and whistles your product or service offers but they will remember a story you tell that provides an example of how these features will effect their lives, even if that effect is small and rather insignificant in the greater scheme of things. After all, not all products and services are life altering, but even minor improvements can create a flood of orders. Below is an example of an audio script we created for a fictitious appliance company to illustrate this point:

"Aaaaah Saturday mornings, a time to sleep-in, read the morning newspaper and have a leisurely breakfast of fresh brewed coffee and toast, just the way you like it.

You take the last two slices of your favorite 12-grain specialty bread that can only be purchased at a Norwegian bakery located halfway across town. You lovingly place the two slices of 12-grain Nirvana in the toaster, and proceed to brew your coffee, and lay out the newspaper without domestic interruption.

And then you smell it, that sickening stench of burnt toast. OH NO! Not again. Your kids have left the toaster set to INCINERATE and your prized toast is 'toast'.

Never let this tragedy happen again. THE TALKING TOASTER! The only toaster on the market that audibly tells you before you plunge your toast into oblivion, exactly what setting your toaster is on.

The Talking Toaster: Save your marriage. Save your kids. Save your toast!
Never ruin another piece of toast again.

THE TALKING TOASTER at a store near you."

This familiar story dramatizes in an entertaining way, a common irritating situation and presents a solution by focusing on one product asset as opposed to a laundry list of features. The simple story-based presentation will be stored in a listener's memory and recalled every time he or she burns a piece of toast. You can hear various audio versions of this example at http://www.sonicpersonality.com.

Conclusion

When it comes to marketing and advertising, logic and rationality are highly over-rated measures. We may be a goal-oriented species, but the goals we strive for may be far different from the goals we own-up-to. If you want to attract more customers, you have to find out what they really want, and not what they say they want. If you want customers to recall who you are, you must present your product or service in a way that makes it easy for them remember.

About the Author

Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design firm that specializes in Web-audio and Web-video. Visit
http://www.mrpwebmedia.com/ads
,
http://www.136words.com
, and
http://www.sonicpersonality.com
. Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com or telephone (905) 764-1246.

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