Demand Generation
Customer Franchise
Need Recognition
Solution Attraction

Marketing Efficiency

Word of Mouth

Brand

Solution Attraction

"Feature, Function, Benefit" is a mantra firmly embedded in most marketing professionals' approach to marketing products and services. It is based on the principal that products and services should be marketed through the eyes of customers and not from the perspective of their creator: it is a "What does it do for me?" approach, rather than just emphasizing technical merit.

How much emphasis a business should place on it is a question of degree:

Businesses need to decide how much money, time, and effort should be spent on promoting solution specifics in comparison to investing in broader positioning, improving customer experience, developing distribution channels, or market education efforts.

Nonetheless, generally speaking, people do wish to understand some detail of what they are buying. This diagram illustrates that customers' interest in functionality varies with: a) The customers' belief about how difficult it is to find a solution which will match their functional requirements, and b) The risk of making a bad purchase choice, which depends on whether solutions differ greatly or are fairly commodity-like, and the consequences if the customer makes a wrong choice.

In all cases, customer decisions will be affected by customer franchise factors such as brand familiarity and preference, convenience, and experience. The relative importance of such factors compared with the actual functionality of a solution varies according to the situation. It is obviously possible that selection criteria unrelated to functionality could dominate purchase decisions, especially on the left hand side of the above diagram. One of the more famous examples of this is the video recorder Beta versus VHS format war in the 1980s. | Read

There are a range of situations which can determine how much emphasis a business should place on solution-focused marketing:

Good Enough
Where the market is well-established and customers have a clear understanding of their need for this type of solution, customers may simply need to feel confident that their requirements will be met (i.e. the solution is "good enough").

Many businesses use their websites as a low-cost means of giving customers access to this information. Where the need for the solution is commonplace and the customer is not interested in checking out such information for different suppliers, word of mouth, brand image and reputation become important factors in decision making.

In such markets, solution attractiveness is unlikely to be the key decision factor. The best approach is likely to be to remove any concerns about a solution's fit to customer needs - so that greater emphasis can be placed on decision criteria related to customer franchise.

Fast Changes
In other situations - such as where product functionality or price/performance is rapidly evolving (such as with VoIP telecoms solutions and Digital Video Recorders in 2005) customers may place great emphasis on evaluating competing solutions since the risk of getting poor value for money (relative to alternative products) is high.

In these fast-changing situations, advertising and promotion is often a combination of brand and product information. The brand values will generally stay reasonably constant throughout a campaign, but because of the rapid change, product information will likely change quite frequently. Again, linking brand claims to more detailed information on websites is a useful, low cost technique.

Innovation

Occasionally, some radical breakthrough will either transform the customers' experience or enable a dramatic reduction in prices and value for money. In these situations, focusing marketing efforts on highlighting solution-specific benefits will be crucial to market development and likely form a key basis of competition in among potential suppliers. The aim would usually be to establish clear differentiation for the business, and incorporating this into the brand positioning if the product advantage can be sustained.

Corporate Procurement

Corporate procurement departments make it their business to acquire detailed specification requirements from end users, and so represent sophisticated buyers. Their job is largely one of cost management, and so their focus is to focus primarily on delivering functionality to their end users - as cost effectively as possible. Their informational needs are therefore high, and this is likely to extend to requiring qualified suppliers to provide online catalogue information and e-commerce interfaces to the business.

Businesses like Dell have invested heavily in providing procurement teams with highly information-rich, tailored online stores that make order placement as frictionless as possible both for the customer and for Dell.

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