So I have a confession: I spend a lot of time checking out the web sites of startups. Sometimes they’re clients, other times they’re friends, and sometimes they’re just interesting companies I want to learn more about. I’m a bit of a startup web site junky.
On most any startup web site, in addition to big headlines and large and friendly illustrations, you’ll almost always find a link in the navigation called Features. See Figure 4-1.
Click that link, and you’ll inevitably land on a page with lots of screenshots and even more bullet points. Prepare yourself for lots of adjectives, too—delightful, clean, beautiful, curated.
The amount of unfounded superlative claims threatens the credibly of the company and the sanity of the reader. This kind of language is often accompanied by lists of phrases describing the product.
Figure 4-1
Example of a generic web site homepage
Most of the time, the Features page is all about showing the user what the product does. At first, that seems pretty logical. It’s obviously important to help users understand what you offer, so on one level, a page like this is helpful. But telling visitors what your product does and how it works is just the starting point, not the finish line.
What if your Features page could do more than simply describe what happens when your users sign in and start clicking things? What if you could use that space to connect with the reader on a deeper level?
Of course, the Features page on your site is just one tangible expression of your brand strategy, and it happens to be a highly visible illustration of the fact that startups too often focus on features instead of benefits. But far beyond web site copy, we’ll see how understanding and articulating your features will become central to a powerful brand story.
Speaking of stories, how much do you think you’d enjoy someone “telling you a story” by simply giving you a list of the key plot points? Something like, “There was a Hobbit who lived happily in a hole, until one day he came across a magical ring. He and his friends had second breakfast while escaping the bad guys.”
This straightforward list does in fact communicate events that happened, but would you call it a story? A list of key points like that can be useful to communicate a synopsis of a story, sure, but no one would stick with a 500-page novel or a 3-hour film that simply rattled off the laundry list.
No, the stories that stick with us are the ones that move us, that bring us into that action, and that evoke a meaningful transformation. The same goes for brands.
A powerful brand moves beyond factual claims into the realm of story and emotion.
And the science proves it. Advertising professionals have always suspected that emotion impacts how people consider and remember brands, and psychology and neuroscience continue to verify that suspicion.
fMRI shows that when evaluating brands, people rely mostly on emotions over objective information, like features and facts, and that positive emotions toward a brand have greater influence over brand loyalty than factual brand attributes.1 As Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor claims in her TEDx Talk,
“Humans aren’t thinking creatures who feel, but feeling creatures who think.”
In addition to enabling powerful storytelling, there’s also the practical reasons for moving beyond a feature focus, which we discussed in the last section: the fact that features themselves are largely indefensible. Outside of patent protection, competitors can simply copy your features. If you’re successful, they almost certainly will.
Before you know it, everyone in your space will offer the exact Features page on their site, and your audience will become increasingly indifferent to which solution they use. Everyone’s the same, so why bother understanding the nuance of each product? Just give me the cheapest one.
In a category defined by feature parity
(that’s the technical term for when companies all offer the same things), one way to build a lasting competitive advantage is through your brand, because there’s more to a brand than the underlying features.
Competitors can’t copy the emotional resonance you create through your brand. So how do you do that?
The path to building emotion into your brand begins with an understanding of the relationship between features and benefits.
The two are related, but not the same. And while the distinction might seem apparent to anyone who’s ever taken any business course, very few founders appreciate the difference, and fewer still communicate on benefits over and beyond features.
In this chapter, we will unpack the relationship between features and benefits and apply a framework that will help you clarify two kinds of benefits that will impact your brand strategy. Before diving into the specifics of each type of benefit, let’s take a moment to lay the groundwork with some key concepts.
The Features-Benefits Continuum
If you’ve ever studied marketing, you likely have seen a chart with Features listed at the top of the left column and Benefits posted at the top of the right (Figure 4-1). The point of such a chart is to demonstrate the relationship between a feature and its benefit.
If we were talking about a new SUV, on the left, you might see “Roof Rack,” and on the right, “Carry more gear.” One feature = one benefit. See Figure 4-2. This approach is a straightforward way to communicate to business school students that every feature should have a clear benefit that customers can understand.
Figure 4-2
Example chart of features and benefits
But while I think the simple features-benefits chart is a useful starting point, it stops short of enabling the kind of emotional storytelling great brands strive for.
To uncover that kind of emotion, I like to take the existing approach one step further and think of two levels of benefits: rational and emotional.
Here’s how each piece fits together:
- A feature is something a thing does.
- The rational benefit is how the user experiences that thing.
- The emotional benefit is the higher-order payoff of that experience. It’s the So What? that originates in the feature itself.
As we’ll see, one feature might have multiple rational benefits, each of which might have multiple emotional benefits as a result. See Figure 4-3.
Figure 4-3
The relationship between a feature, its rational benefits, and its emotional benefits
Let us consider another example. If you’ve ever been on the Apple web site or visited an Apple Store, you’ll see that for its MacBook Pro line, Apple offer offers dozens of features across its various models.
One of the most practical, and probably my favorite, is the solid-state hard drive, or the SSD. The retina screen truly is impressive, the Touch Bar is actually kind of neat, and the lightweight and slim profile are killer too. But it’s the SSD that I value daily.
The SSD is a feature. It is an indisputable thing that is true about the MBP. You can imagine Apple listing the SSD in the Features box on their brand strategy canvas, and they definitely list it on their web site.
One rational benefit is that the computer boots faster than traditional mechanical hard drives. In other words, I experience the SSD through faster boot times and faster application loading.
So what’s the emotional payoff? You can imagine that there might be multiple options, and we’ll explore different approaches below. But for the sake of discussion, one emotional payoff of the faster load times is that I have more time to do the things I love.
Figure 4-4 shows the relationship between SSD, its rational benefits, and its emotional benefits. We’ll build on this example later.
Figure 4-4
A solid-state drive means my laptop boots faster, which gives me more time for the things I love
To summarize, you can see that a solid-state drive means my laptop boots faster, which gives me more times for the things I love. Compared to the simple features-benefits chart, this approach will challenge you to consider your product through the perspective of your audience, which will provide plenty of raw material for your brand execution later.
As you work through the canvas, you’ll build a web of features and benefits that will help you connect both rationally and emotionally with your audience.
Building a Ladder of Abstraction
One mental model that’s useful when exploring levels of benefits is a concept called the ladder of abstraction, which is a concept created by Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa in his book Language in Thought and Action.2
Hayakawa was a linguist, psychologist, and semanticist, and his thinking gets pretty deep. But the ladder of abstraction will help you orient yourself as you discuss features and different kinds of benefits.
Hayakawa used the ladder to illustrate ways humans use language to classify objects and ideas into categories for easy communication. Consider Bessie the Cow, which is his archetypical object for discussion.
Bessie the Cow stands at the bottom of the ladder of abstraction. Although Bessie is in every way different from other cows on an anatomical level, the abstract idea of “cow” allows us to leave behind all of the differences between all the cows in the world and emphasize their similarities, namely, that they are all cows.
That means we can productively discuss cows without having to explain, before each discussion, which specific configuration of atoms we’re talking about.
He then illustrates that as we climb the ladder, the rungs become increasingly abstract. We can talk about “livestock,” then “farm assets,” and all the way up to the concept of “wealth.”
Moving up the ladder answers why questions, such as “Why do I want cattle? To build wealth.”
Moving down the ladder allows us to become increasingly concrete, answering the how questions, like “How can we build wealth? By owning cattle.” See Figure 4-5.
Figure 4-5
Illustration of the ladder of abstraction
In the case of brand strategy, Features answer how questions near the bottom, while emotional benefits answer why questions near the top. Why do I want a solid-state hard drive? To spend more time on things I care about. See Figure 4-6.
Figure 4-6
Example ladder of abstraction
Balancing Emotions and Facts
A strong and comprehensive brand strategy will include content at all levels of abstraction, combining strong emotion with specific facts. It’s important for your strategy to be built on both emotions and facts for a couple of reasons.
First, communications that rely on emotion alone will feel disingenuous or over the top. Think about the late-night infomercials—you know, the ones that feature a mom, in the midst of cooking dinner for a roomful of crazy kids, who reaches into the pantry for a can of corn only to have the pantry’s disorganized contents falls all over the floor. And of course, it’s all shot in black and white.
Those ads feel like caricatures or parodies—the stuff of gimmicky as-seen-on-TV products and not the domain of enduring brands.
Or consider cologne ads filled with extremely beautiful and rich people running in slow motion across a craggy Mediterranean beach. The implicit message is that this could be your life too, if only you were to buy this fragrance.
Sure, that type of advertising is definitely emotional, but it’s also hollow. We just don’t believe it. And that’s what happens when your strategy is heavily weighted with emotion at the top of the ladder. But there’s also danger in stripping all the emotion from your brand and leaning only on rational appeals.
A strong brand will incorporate rational appeals with emotional concepts. If emotion without fact seems vacuous, facts without emotion will come across as just plain boring.
I’ve seen this issue on many early-stage startup web sites, where the headline on the home page says something like, “An API for search” and nothing more. Again, it’s kind of like someone reading you a story’s bullet points rather than getting to expense the narrative.
If you climb to the top of a ladder without any support at the bottom, the ladder will become unstable and likely come crashing down, as is the case with emotion-only language. On the other hand, standing on the bottom rung of a ladder is safe, but it also won’t take you anywhere. You need both to be effective.
Staying Grounded
Another practical benefit of mapping the features-benefits continuum is that this process will keep you and your team honest and, as we’ll see later, more authentic.
One of the most common rookie mistakes founders make is the use of casual superlatives. Superlatives include phrases like “The best way…” or “The fastest way…”
So many home pages make claims like these, and rarely do they back them up with fact. In many ways, these are the worst kinds of emotional claims. Are you really the fastest or easiest? Can the claim even be proven or disproven? Does anyone care?
Superlative claims come across as lazy to the informed observer, but much worse, your audience almost certainly reads right past them.
This kind of messaging doesn’t feel authentic, just like it wouldn’t feel authentic if a person walked up to you and said, “Hey, I’m the coolest person you’ll ever meet.” Not only would you not believe them, you probably wouldn’t trust anything they said after that and would likely be at least a little creeped out.
As normal humans navigating life, we’re constantly bombarded by claims of fastest, cheapest, coolest, and craziest so much that we’ve developed a kind of blindness to such unfounded assertions.
Rather than pick this low-hanging and likely rotten fruit, do the hard work of connecting your benefits to your features up and down the ladder. This section will show you how.
Rational Benefits
Let’s start with rational benefits. Rational benefits are the outcomes of your key features, and they answer the question So what? A user would ask of everything you offer and move a step or two up the ladder of abstraction.
The classic example comes from a quote by Theodore Levitt, famous Harvard professor of economics known for his Harvard Business Review article “Marketing Myopia.”3 Levitt said,
“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”
Levitt here is getting at the rational benefit of a quarter-inch drill bit. The hole is one way a person might experience the use of the bit.
A solid-state hard drive means the computer will boot with lightning speed. A 24-hour store means you can shop whenever you want. Batteries included with that toy? That means no delay in playtime.
In addition to answering the So what? question, rational benefits capture
how your customers experience those features.
As you think about delivering unique value, one way to differentiate is in your brand’s approach to delivering specific outcomes. We’ll discuss how that comes to life below.
Do the Work for Your Customers
Before we fully unpack rational benefits, we should talk about a major reason this section matters. We’ve already discussed how rational benefits help set the groundwork for an emotional appeal, but there’s another reason to identify the connection between features and rational benefits.
Here’s the problem with simply listing features: doing so pushes all the cognitive burden to your audience, leaving it entirely up to them to connect the conceptual dots between your claim and why they should care.
To be sure, your customers aren’t stupid. But they do have thousands of marketing messages pointed directly at their brains all day every day. That kind of value causes mental fatigue, and it’s just not realistic to expect them to make the right connections between your feature list and what it means for them on their own.
You might be thinking, “Well, my customers are actually super smart, I don’t need to spell it out for them.” In reality, this perspective is entirely company-centric, self-centered, and not empathic to the customer reality at all.
Instead of making them do the mental legwork of trying to answer So what? and, even worse, getting the answer wrong, smart brands paint the picture fully by proving clarity on why their offering matters.
Once you’ve completed this section, your team will have a handy checklist of the primary reasons your product matters to your audience, which will prove useful in all sorts of situations, from conversations with prospects to writing web site copy to recruiting new team members.
Let’s explore an example to see what that can look like by turning back to our example company, MailChimp, which we introduced in Chapter 3, and which we’ll return to in each following chapter as we complete the Brand Strategy Canvas.
Example Rational Benefits
Only need to login to (and remember the password for) one tool; manage all marketing in a single place; total control over your channels, and a cohesive experience across each; simple navigation; find what you need and do more work faster; supportive and empathic interaction design; fast help whenever and however you need it, either self-serve, from us, or from a trusted partner; know how your campaigns are performing across channels
In the example, you begin to see how the customer experiences the features highlighted in the prior box, along with thoughts on why it all matters for the customer.
The result of all those features, the so what, is that I can manage all my marketing in a single place, with control and a cohesive experience. As a busy marketer, figuring out how to deal with all the moving parts of a complex operation might feel overwhelming, but into the complexity, Mailchimp has designed simple navigation across the various parts.
All of that is made even better through the empathic user interface and simple navigation across all the different parts. Those benefits probably sound great for our busy target audience. They’re sophisticated, but don’t have time to master a complex UI, so simplicity is key for them.
Finally, whether they’re small business owners or heads of marketing, they will likely need help at some point. The good news for anyone in our audience? There are multiple kinds of support available when I need it, from trusted partners.
To reiterate, rational benefits speak to how the features are experienced.
As mentioned before, features alone aren’t particularly useful for building a lasting brand because anyone can copy them. On top of that, as a startup, how often do the specifics of your feature set change? Probably somewhat frequently.
For those reasons, you really can’t build a brand based on features.
You can, however, begin to differentiate based on how you articulate the benefits, and that begins here, with rational benefits.
As for counter examples, think about Mailchimp’s competition and how they might talk about their benefits. They likely all offer email design tools, but how would they describe them? They’re probably not designed empathetically. And if they are, their messaging doesn’t bother to communicate them as such.
Overall, the competition may offer similar features in a line-by-line comparison but the way they’re delivered—and how customers experience them—couldn’t be any different.
In light of the features-benefits continuum, it’s important that you don’t skip this step. As we discussed, clear rational benefits will provide you with lots of copy points as you develop your web site and other assets, and your team will continue to reference them going forward.
On top of that, rational benefits are the bridge to emotional benefits. Believe me, it’s really hard to jump from features all the way to emotional benefits without coming across as either naive or as a huckster, so spend the time here before moving on to emotional benefits, which are coming next.
Thought Starters
- What are the tangible benefits of your product?
- How does each feature actually impact your target audience?
- How does each one improve their lives?
- What are the top three most unique rational benefits?
Emotional Benefits
Now you have a solid list of important and differentiated features, along with a several reasons for your audience to care about them. That’s a strong foundation for exploring emotional benefits, which are, in my opinion, where things start to get really fun.
Here’s why: all the sections up to this point have been largely about observations, like who are my customers, what do they offer them, and what’s going on in the market?
With emotional benefits, you start getting into the heads of your customer to reflect on and empathize with how your brand affects them at the deepest levels.
Your insights here are definitely based on those prior observations, but they add in a creative and interpretive layer.
That’s challenging and fun, but it’s also highly powerful. Most startups don’t bother to build emotion into their brands; they stop at rational benefits and often just list features. That means you’ll have plenty of room for powerful storytelling and differentiation.
So what’s the heuristic for this section?
If the main question for rational benefits is “So what?” for emotional benefits, we want to unpack “So that.” In other words, what’s the emotional payoff of your offering?
That probably sounds lofty, so let’s look at an example.
Example Emotional Benefits
Peace of mind from using a single tool, instead of learning multiple platforms; delight in the creation process; satisfaction in the quality of the experience; enjoyment of the marketing design process; confidence in my ability to get help when I need it; low stress related to my marketing systems; clarity of purpose
In this example, the fact that Mailchimp includes lots of marketing channels leads to peace of mind vs. the stress of having to remember how to use, and pay for, lots of different tools. Customers will experience delight through the easy and beautiful interface. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, they’ll experience enjoyment as they create campaigns.
As you can see, words like “peace of mind,” “delight,” and “satisfaction” move from the realm of listing features into the world of emotions and carry more meaning as a result. Certainly, these claims are built upon the features—otherwise, they wouldn’t be authentic.
But by moving beyond bullet points listing what your product does, you can begin to appeal to the emotional parts of your customers’ minds, which, as the science tells us, will help ensure your message sticks.
So how do you determine the emotional benefits of your product? There’s no single way to get there, but I’ve picked up a few tactics over the years.
Tactics for Discovering Emotional Benefits
First, remember that it starts with customer empathy, so listen closely in your customer conversations. Ask questions like “How do you feel when you use the product” and “What does this solve for you?”
Most people don’t think deeply about their feelings, though, especially as it relates to using SaaS products, so don’t expect customers to articulate their deepest needs in flowery language. That means you’ll need to listen closely.
Also pay attention to how they characterize the problem they’re solving and the frustrations that come with it. They might express things like stress about too many priorities, annoyance with unfriendly interfaces, or overwhelm from the number of things on their plate.
Often, your emotional benefits can be found in the opposites of those words. For example, “peace of mind” is a great antidote to the overwhelm and frustration caused by the profusion of marketing tools and platforms, so it may serve is a perfect emotional benefit to explore.
Finally, consider using a list of emotions like the Feelings Inventory4 to help jumpstart your thinking and connect the dots between what customers describe and a particular feeling.
To stay organized, try using a mind map to connect features to rational benefits to emotional benefits. Having everything in a single view will help you dig into the details while keeping an eye on the big picture.
Thought Starters
- What are the intangible benefits of your product?
- What descriptive language do customers use when discussing your product?
- What types of words do they use when describing their problems and frustrations?
- What need or challenge of the target audience does each emotional benefit address?
- Do your emotional benefits clearly connect back to rational benefits and the underlying features?
Bringing It All Together, or a Tale of Two Campaigns
Features, rational benefits, and emotional benefits all provide critical input to your positioning statement, but they can also prove useful later on as you develop campaign concepts and key messaging.
Before we explore how this continuum manifests in the execution of your strategy, let’s recap a few examples of the features-benefits continuum.
A quarter-inch drill bit (feature) buys holes in my wall (rational) that I use for hanging paintings by my favorite artist (rational), which instills a sense of pride (emotional) from supporting the local art scene, along with prestige among my friend group (emotional) for being such a savvy consumer.
A solid-state hard drive (feature) makes my laptop boot quickly (rational) and helps applications load two times faster (rational) so that I can finish my work and spend more time with my family (emotional). See Figure 4-7 for an illustration of the relationships between these features and benefits.
Figure 4-7
Illustrated relationship between features and benefits
A massive inventory of shoes (feature) means that there lots of relevant shoes for me to choose from (rational) leading to peace of mind about my purchase (emotional).
Later, when you’re developing web site copy or ad campaigns, features and benefits become incredibly practical, as they can help inspire the overall big idea while also provide tangible reasons to believe the claim of the campaign.
While I wouldn’t consider these rules hard and fast, I’ve often seen a mapping of concepts that looks something like this:
- Emotional benefits —high-level big idea campaign direction influencing tone, style, and overall direction
- Rational benefits —key copy points that flesh out the campaign idea, sometimes subheads or key sections on a web site
- Features —the proof points that support the claims made by the rational benefits
Using our laptop example, you could imagine a series of print ads all organized around the theme of the importance of making more time to do the things that you love with your family. That’s the big idea stemming from the emotional benefit.
Then each ad in the campaign might explore a different facet of the idea, leading with a single rational benefit per ad, supported by the relevant features.
Taken as a whole, the notion that the laptop brand supports and enables more family time would become clear. As a result, instead of getting lost in the sea of feature comparisons and competition, over time, such a brand would build a position as a brand that empathizes the plight of the working professional with a family.
Once you have a strong understanding of your brand’s emotional benefits, all sorts of creative directions will become evident, each one based on the truth of your offering, which come through via your features.
Let’s consider another example, using the same baseline information. Going back to our laptop brand, in addition to creating more time to do the things I love, another emotional benefit we might highlight is that the speed of the laptop helps me perform better at my job. What would happen if we doubled down to create a campaign focused on that idea?
All the features and benefits are identical to the “time for things I love” direction, but the emotional payoff of performing better is completely different.
In that scenario, it’s all about driving value for my team, making my boss look good, standing out from my peers, and delivering results for my company—same features, same rational benefits, completely different approach overall.
So, given the multitude of options available, how do you know which direction to pick?
That depends on the Market Opportunity section of the canvas, your final brand strategy, and your positioning statement, which we’ll cover in the next section.
The key here is that that fully exploring all your features and benefits will provide you with an inventory of powerful and authentic ideas for creating a unique position in the market.
Conclusion
On the surface, features and benefits might seem like a straightforward aspect of your product. But hopefully, after working through these exercises, you can see the competitive edge you’ll gain by investing in the process. In the end, you and your team will have clarity on how different parts of your product resonate, both cognitively and emotionally, which will serve as a solid foundation for building your brand.
Thought Starters
Your main homework for this section is to create a features-benefits continuum of your own. In a blank spreadsheet, add all your features to the first column.
In the second column, add one rational benefit per cell beside each feature. Some features will have multiple benefits, so just add rows to accommodate. Then, add emotional benefits beside each rational benefit.
When you’re done, you’ll have created a useful reference document for your team to build from.