Features and Benefits

 

While watching the Badgers in an NCAA Basketball Tournament game Sunday, an ad came on for a Kia vehicle. The announcer excitedly said the Kia SUV featured “torque vectoring – and, a center-locking differential!!!”

I waited for the overenthusiastic announcer to explain what torque vectoring is, and what a center-locking differential does, so that the 95% of the viewers who are not gearheads like me would understand what he was talking about. Suffice it to say he never explained it. I wondered who approved using such arcane language in a commercial supposedly targeted to a mass audience.

The ad violated one of what used to be the cardinal rules of writing ad copy: if you’re going to cite a feature, be sure to explain the benefit. But given my failure to understand the purpose of so many ads I see on TV today, it’s possible the old rule was tossed out decades ago. Now it all has to do with "branding" or some such, which goes over the heads of dinosaurs like me.

My first introduction to the features/benefits concept was in the early ‘60’s, when I heard a recording of Dr. Murray Banks, a then-famous psychiatrist, describing how vacuum cleaners were being mis-marketed by Madison Avenue. Dr. Banks said the sales pitches involved facts like how much power the electric motor in the vacuum cleaner has, how it rolls on fancy new wheels, how engineers used new research to modify the design.

“Forget all that stuff,” Banks said (or words to that effect). “They should just say to the housewife this vacuum cleaner works so efficiently it will add five years to your life expectancy,” Dr. Banks said, which got a big laugh from the audience he was speaking to.

Remember, this was recorded in the early 60’s, hence the outdated “housewife” reference. But Dr. Banks had hit upon one of the core flaws in the advertising business: a feature without a benefit doesn’t mean much to the consumer.

As a fledgling broadcaster, my concept of features and benefits was sharpened at a sales seminar I attended. The presenter said, “when your sales presentation says your station has fifty thousand watts of power, what does that feature mean to the average businessperson?” He answered his own question by saying, “Nothing. Not a thing, unless you hook that feature to a benefit, and explain it by saying the station has fifty thousand watts of power, which means your advertising message will come through loud and clear over the entire marketing area.”

He went on to give several other examples of oft-advertised product features, meaningless without being hooked to a benefit.

A lot of businesses understand this basic advertising concept, but sometimes the failures, when as obvious as the Kia ad I saw, are mind-blowing. I’m sure Kia paid some ad agency a lot of money to tout torque vectoring and a center-locking differential.

What a waste.