My previous post slammed marketing for using too many buzzwords – and received several comments to the effect that marketing materials should emphasize “benefits.” That sounds like Marketing 101, but it’s also dead wrong. In fact, there’s only one type of marketing message that gets through to prospects, and it has nothing to do with abstract benefits.
The problem with product “benefits” is that they’re always the same. Take Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, for instance. Every package has identical benefits: increasing sales revenue while decreasing average cost per sale. Every CRM prospect already knows that, so why bother telling them? Same thing with consumer products. For example, every automobile gets you where you’re going. Why bother to point it out?
What does work for demand creation? Short answer: testimonials. Long answer: real customer narratives with high emotional content, where something unique about the product either saves the customer from massive pain or creates massive pleasure, preferably both. (Read that sentence twice, because it’s really, really important.)
That formula is nearly universal in consumer product advertising. Drive a Volvo, and you’ll escape an accident (avoid pain), and look upscale while you do it (gain pleasure). Drink a Budweiser, and you’ll date a hot chick (gain pleasure) and prove you’re not just some bar bozo (avoid pain).
The same technique works in Business-To-Business sales. I recently ran a focus group for Dell Computer to determine what influenced small/medium business owners to buy. Of some three dozen attendees, not ONE was influenced to ANY degree by press releases, vendor presentations, analyst reports, product-oriented advertising or any other traditional demand-creation method. The ONLY thing that drove buying behavior was a positive recommendation from a peer. In other words, a testimonial.
Let's look an an example. Examine the following “benefits” paragraph, lifted verbatim from an actual press release:
“By embedding business rules into Siebel CRM, businesses are able to achieve new levels of cost containment, time-to-market response and long-term competitive advantages. Haley technology is a key part of the Siebel Privacy Management solution within Siebel Universal Customer Master, a comprehensive customer data hub that unifies customer data across multiple business units and functionally disparate systems to provide a trusted authoritative source of customer information across the enterprise.”
Here's how that same information might look as a testimonial:
“When our company doubled in size in less than year, our corporate data was a mess. We couldn’t service our customers. Placing an order was a nightmare. Sales went down the toilet. As sales manager, I was taking all the heat. Fortunately, Siebel brought in the expertise and technology to help us glue our different systems together. Now sales are up and our customer satisfaction ratings are twice as high as before the merger. And now I'm the new VP of Sales.”
Assuming that the second paragraph isn't BS, which demand creation paragraph do you think is more likely to get a prospect to grab for the phone?
