Remember Features and Benefits? Sure; thats Sales 101, right? Features describe a product or service, Benefits describe what that product or service does for the customer. These are pretty basic concepts, but sometimes a small business marketer needs to borrow these time-tested sales techniques to help build a Brand Banner or to dredge up a clever marketing promotion or ad campaign.

Stickiness is an idea described by Gladwell in The Tipping Point. For our marketing purposes, stickiness is how well your marketing message is remembered by--sticks with--your customers and prospects. Stickiness can be achieved by a catchy phrase or a clever marketing gimmick or some type of giveaway or a clever slogan. The idea is to get customers to remember your business; to make it stick with them inside their mind.

The following is a simple exercise designed to help you with building your next promotion or clarifying your brand. Set aside, say, fifteen minutes and just look at your companys strengths. For now, please forget about your company compared to the competition. This isnt a discovery exercise in figuring out where your company is positioned in the market. To start with, simply list features and benefits of your primary products or services. Remember, a feature is a function, the what it does of a product or service. A benefit is a what is does for the customer. There is a world of difference between the two. We suggest you build a simple table on your computer, or you can even rough it out on a piece of notebook paper. Construct four columns, with the following column headings:

• Feature
• Benefit
• One or two Words that Sum Up Benefit
• How to make it Sticky

Underneath the four columns, list ten or twenty rows. Its best to write down loads of features and benefits, even ones that you think trivial, and then eliminate ones that arent relevant to your marketing efforts. So the first two columns may have twenty rows, while the last two might look half full. You might be able to combine certain features and benefits with the same marketing message or device. Your time will be well spent if you conjure up even a couple decent marketing ideas that help to effectively communicate your companys Brand to your customers.

For example, if ample parking is a plus at your shop, then list plenty of free parking as a feature. The benefits would include no money spent on meters; no wasted time looking for a parking space; customers dont have to walk far to our store. A couple words that sum up your parking might be free, close-by parking.

Making this benefit memorable is a different trick. What if you ran a week-long promotion where you gave a dime to each customer who shopped at your store? The reasonthe next time they are shopping where theres a meter theyll have a dime, courtesy of Your Store, the home of always free, always close parking. The idea here isnt to come up with a dozen promotions. Rather, its to flesh out the little things that can set you apart from the competition. This is the type of exercise you can spend a few days on, thirty minutes at a time, here and there. Its hard to pull everything up and out of your brain in one quick setting; better to let ideas percolate around inside for a while.

Oh, and dont forget the People marketing element when working on this. After you make a good beginning on your list, share it with the Bloom Team. They will no doubt hand you some valuable marketing ideas for that last column, but theres often another benefit. Because many of them are close to the customers, they may have customer feedback on actual Benefits that you may have overlooked.

Best of luck--and please do share with us any of your success stories or ideas that have worked well for you.

2006 Marketing Hawks