Positioning Guide 12

Product benefits often serve as benefit supports for a brand benefit.

Marketers in all product categories fall in love with their products.  As a result of this love of product, they want to talk about their products more than end-users want to hear about their products.  And often they forget to tie the product benefits to the brand benefit.

As an example, Ford stylists and marketers expected the second generation of Tarus to be a success because of the oval styling.  They proudly said that the side sculpting of the vehicle when viewed directly from the side with overhead lighting produced an oval shadow on the side.  How many consumers noticed?  Not enough to make the model a marketplace success.

One of my favorite example brands is Pantene Pro V shampoo.  The target customers are women, and what do women want out of a shampoo?  Beautiful shiny hair.  Why do women want beautiful shiny hair?  So that they’ll get hugs and kisses from attractive people.  Hugs and kisses from attractive people (social want/need) is the root motivating benefit for this product category.  Pantene Pro V is vitamin enriched which contributes to healthy hair.  If Pantene Pro V stopped at healthy hair, they would just be stating a product benefit and healthy hair doesn’t directly lead to hugs and kisses from attractive people.  So Pantene Pro V goes one step further with the theme-line, “For hair so healthy it shines.”  An example commercial for this brand may be found on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxswBtKkKUE

If you’ve read my biography on the blog home page, you saw that I spent many years doing marketing in the tire category.  One of the best product launches that I saw in my career was for a consumer passenger tire name the Michelin HydroEdge (following the game rule of good names are suggestive of use or benefit).  At that time, the unique brand benefit of the Michelin brand was security of the family (social want/need)/  Michelin trains its salespeople in feature / advantage / benefit selling.  The benefit, however, is a product benefit, not a brand benefit.  Nevertheless, marketing people can focus on those product benefits which support the brand benefit of security. Here are a couple of examples of product benefits of the Michelin HydroEdge that support the unique brand benefit of security:

Moving from the consumer product category to the business-to-business product category, the Michelin X One commercial truck tire has product features/advantages/ benefits that directly support an economic brand benefit of increasing the end-user’s revenue.  In some trucking vocations, such as bulk hauling, vehicles reach their weight limit before the vehicle is full.  If the tires and wheels weigh less, then the operator can carry more cargo thereby increasing revenue.  To demonstrate the weight savings of the Michelin X One over a set of dual tires in tractor and trailer application, the marketing people have developed the chart below.

Note that this example stops with the product benefit of weight savings.  Target end-users will be forced to make the translation of weight savings > carry more cargo > make more money.  The impact of this chart would be increased if some dollar amounts reflecting “make more money” were included.  While it would be best to have dollar amounts which could be generalized to all target end-users, a testimonial could serve the same purpose.