Remember that reMAMBA acronym for getting your marketing messages right?
M – Mission
A – Audience
M – Media
B – Benefits
A – Articulation
In this article we look at marketing benefits and how they work for you.
As you know, the key objective of the vast majority of marketing missions is to bring about some kind of change. This can be active, like a change in behaviour (buying office stationery products from your store rather than your competitors’, using your software products/training programmes/coaching services instead of someone else’s, adopting your proposals for a new marketing strategy, etc.) Or, it can be passive – a change in perception (looking more favourably at a large employer within a community, promoting a celebrity or expert via the media).
99% of the time, to get anyone to change their way of thinking or behaving requires some kind of incentive. Very few people will change anything about themselves without a good reason for doing it, and that reason has be good for them – no-one else. This means that if you are going to persuade anyone to change their views or their actions as a result of absorbing your message, it has to offer some sort of implied or actual reward.
Do yourself a favour. Take a felt-tip pen and a piece of white paper, and write this down:
What’s in it for them?
Now pin the piece of paper up on the wall of your office or workspace. (Or better still, key that into your desktop and use it as your screensaver.) That’s your motto whenever you compose anything that forms part of any marketing mission you undertake.
Another point which runs on from here is that there is absolutely nothing new about this notion. The evergreen stalwart of “what’s in it for them” – a derivative of the equally old “features and benefits” story – has nothing whatsoever to do with the latest Business School philosophies and everything to do, simply, with human nature.
People do not move out of their comfort zones unless there is something in it for them. And why should they? Very few animals embrace change because change usually means facing the unknown, of which most creatures are scared. So change with no obvious compensation suggests insecurity, threats to the status quo, upsets within the hierarchy, disunity within the herd, vulnerability to predators.
Business gurus try to persuade us that corporate change is good, and in most cases, of course, they’re right. Without change we’d still be living in caves and growing turnips for a living.
However ordinary folks are sceptical of change and for good reason. In a corporate context, far too often in recent years the word “change” has been used as a smelly smokescreen that really means job cuts. “Change” in a marketing context often has been used as an equally smelly smokescreen permitting manufacturers to sneak in price rises. “Change” and its stable mate “progress” have been used repeatedly to shame us all into regularly buying new bits of technology whether we need them or not.
Okay, as business people ourselves we all work to earn money and we understand that our role often does mean engaging in marketing missions that help organizations to downsize, raise prices in line with inflation, create demand that sells more product, etc. etc. But no matter how good we are at our jobs we’re never going to re-engineer human nature.
That’s why I believe that for any marketing mission to succeed it has to supply what human nature needs – something worthwhile in it for the recipient, no matter how subtle, to create the impulsion and motivation needed to overcome people’s innate resistance to change.
For the sake of your marketing mission’s success, we need to take a good look at the old “features and benefits” story. Sales trainers have been attempting to drill this into the brains of sales men and women for decades. It’s what advertising copywriters learn, or should learn, before they attempt to write their first classified ad in a local newspaper.
Features smell, benefits sell. That’s another sentence you won’t read in the lecture notes from any self-respecting business school. But I like the way it both rhymes and expresses an important point.
For anyone who still doesn’t know the difference between the two, here goes: features are what something is, benefits are what it does for you.
The benefit of the benefits
Often within a marketing mission you’ll be dealing with what appears to be dozens of features which turn into at least several benefits. Usually that is an illusion, because even an apparently unrelated selection of benefits will probably have a common denominator, and it’s the common denominator that’s going to get – and retain – your audience’s attention, not a shopping list of different, lesser benefits.
And in many cases, that represents what the advertising world calls the “USP” – Unique Selling Proposition. The key “umbrella” benefit is what makes your message worth paying attention to – “what’s in it for them.”
Under the “umbrella” benefit, then, the other, smaller benefits serve to substantiate and support it. And that’s OK. What isn’t OK is when you find that someone has sneaked in and added stuff which has little or nothing to do with the main issue.
Sometimes of course, there are no obvious key benefits for the recipient of the message, e.g. “I need more money to finance my business and I want to borrow it from you.” Here you need to look a bit harder, but usually it’s still possible to drum up something. If you use “Request for further finance” as the subject heading in a letter or e-mail to the finance company then it’s clear there is absolutely nothing in it for them, so you’d better be a good customer and regular payer to stand a chance.
However, what about “Capital required to launch sought-after new product” … or even a play on the heartstrings with “Request for further funding to secure company’s future and employees’ jobs.” Both of those offer the reader something, at least, which is always better than nothing at all.
So don’t forget … reMAMBA!
For a digest of all five reMAMBA key sections, click here.
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