Questions From A Novice Client – Now What Is A Benefit (Really)

With some 10 years of copywriting experience under my belt I can honestly say that most business owners and many sales people don’t understand what a benefit really is.
Far to often I get asked What is the difference between a feature and a benefit and why do I need to know?
Honestly, I wasn’t too clear on it in my early days as a door-to-door salesman. It wasn’t until after I really studied salesmanship and copywriting in great depth that I could articulate the difference between the two.
If you are working with an average copywriter then you’ll get them talking in what might be called level one benefits.
Level one benefits are the benefits you get when you create a list of features of the product and then and then figure out what those benefits of those features are.
Take a few sample features and benefits from a car as an example:
Your list of features will include things like: Red Paint Job, V6 engine, Stability Control…
The features list is really boring unless you know what those features give you as a driver bring you. This is why a rev heads get excited over a big V6 engine. They know what it will do for them.
However for the uninitiated they are not particularly desirable that is why we need to create benefits.
The benefits they offer will include things like Your car will stand out from other cars, You’ll feel an incredible rush when you put the foot to the floor to overtake a truck that is going to slow, better handling of all the power. So you don’t crash.
This partial list of benefits seems much more exciting than just the plain ordinary features doesn’t it?
However none of these level one benefits on their own don’t really seem like compelling reasons to plonk down the $30,000 or more that it costs to get a new car.
But that is okay because there are benefits within those benefits.
If you look into most advertising, even brand building general advertising, you can see that they are usually trying to sell you something else. Car ads are often selling something far deeper than ‘power’ or ‘standing out from the crowd.’
They are offering up far deeper and more compelling benefits than that. What they are offering up is being a real ‘man,’ a sense of youth, good times or being the life of the party. These deeper benefits can be found by drilling into the importance of each of your initial benefits.