When (and How) To Market Product Features
Consider this quote from Seth Godin’s This Is Marketing.
“Theodore Levitt famously said, ‘People don’t want to buy a quarter inch drill bit. They want a quarter inch hole.’ … But that doesn’t go nearly far enough. No one wants a hole. What people want is the shelf that will go on the wall once they drill the hole. Actually, what they want is how they’ll feel once they see how uncluttered everything is, when they put their stuff on the shelf that went on the wall, now that there’s a quarter inch hole.”
When marketing anything, emotion is king. Emotion is what sells. Deep down, people don’t really care about product features. They care about how the product will make them feel. Even gear heads and tech gurus don’t really care about product features. They care about the respect and admiration they get from their peers when they know about product features.
That said, product features are important. They’re often what truly differentiates your product from the competition. They’re just not the most important thing. Think of product features as a means to an end. In many cases, product features can help people achieve the desired emotion in a way other products can’t.
Here’s a quick framework I developed for when and how to market product features:
Product Features Road Map
Who this helps
What this helps them accomplish
How the product features help accomplish that
What this helps them accomplish (again)
Let’s create a scenario about an ad for a drill. Let’s say you’re tasked with marketing a drill to someone like me, who has very minimal building experience. You could rattle off all the product features. You could let me know that it’s magnetic, that it’s battery powered, that it is self-stabilizing, that it has an auto stud finder. But guess what? I don’t want any of those features. What I want is confidence that even I can use this drill, and that it will make the process much simpler.
Here’s some sample copy for our drill:
Introducing the drill for people who drill once a year.
Hang shelves and artwork in your apartment flawlessly (even if you never do stuff like that).
The self-stabilizer ensures your holes are clean and strong. The auto stud finder helps you drill once and only once.
Don’t let low-tech drills keep you from what you imagine. Grab the super drill today and design your dream apartment with ease.
See how the framework works there? The product features were a means to an end. They gave me confidence that the drill could deliver on the emotion it was selling.
Happy marketing!
