Image from The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

In The Matrix Reloaded, the computer program known as the Architect takes on the form of a cold, stern old man. He is the creator of the matrix, the virtual reality program being pumped into the brain of most humans.

Because the Architect sees the world as a series of equations to be balanced, he doesn’t truly understand free will and choice. He therefore had great difficulty in creating a version of the matrix that humans would accept, and he recounted his frustration with the limitations of his logic:

“The first matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect, it was a work of art, flawless, sublime. A triumph equaled only by its monumental failure.

The inevitability of its doom is apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every human being, thus I redesigned it, based on your history, to more accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of your nature. However, I was again frustrated by failure.

I have since come to understand that the answer eluded me because it required a lesser mind, or perhaps, a mind less bound by the parameters of perfection. Thus, the answer was stumbled upon by another, an intuitive program, initially created to investigate certain aspects of the human psyche. If I am the father of the matrix, she would undoubtedly be its mother.”

He was referring to the Oracle, who discovered that nearly 99% of all humans would accept the matrix if they were given the subconscious choice of accepting it. Finally, they had a viable version of the matrix. The solution wasn’t to be more logical, but to be more human.

I think I’m having a similar issue with understanding features and benefits. Ironically, my Myers-Briggs type, INTP, is known as the Architect. That doesn’t mean I’m emotionally dead, just that I’m logical, which I hear is a curse for marketing. Can someone help me understand humans?

Specifically, how humans see features and benefits when deciding to buy something. I talked about this with James Chartrand from Men with Pens, who was tremendously helpful. Before I get to that though, let me start off with how I saw features and benefits before talking to James.

The difference between features and benefits

Let’s say you’re browsing the selections at an online bookstore, and you come across one that strikes your fancy. While deciding whether you want to buy it, you notice that the bookstore offers free shipping.

Free shipping is a feature. It’s an attribute of the bookstore’s service. Common marketing wisdom says that people don’t buy because of features, they buy because of benefits. They think “OK, it has free shipping. So what?” Benefits are what the features actually do for them, and that’s what they’re really buying.

To turn a feature into a benefit, you have to figure out what it actually means for the customer. I’ve heard you should pretend you’re talking to a child (or a little guy on your shoulder) who keeps asking “So what?” You keep answering “So what?” until you get to the real benefit.

Lets see the little guy in action:

“You get free shipping.”

“So what?”

“You don’t pay shipping costs.”

“So what?”

“You save money.”

“So what?”

“You’ll have more money than you would otherwise.”

“So what?”

“Money can be exchanged for goods and services.”

“So what?”

The little guy’s not too bright, is he? Now we’re at a point where we can branch off into many different directions. What goods and services does he care about most? Would he rather buy a BMW, or feed starving children in Africa? We don’t know.

Let’s make a guess. Many people seem to want to spend more time with their family, so let’s take that angle.

“With more money, you’ll be able to afford the same goods and services without working as much.”

“So what?”

“Since you don’t have to work as much, you can spend more time with your family.”

“So what?”

Egads! He pulled the old “So what?” trick on us! There’s nothing to stop him from using that ad infinitum. If he can pretend he doesn’t know why free shipping is good, or what money can be used for, he can pretend he doesn’t know why he would want to spend more time with his family.

Where does it end? When will he say “Yes, that’s the real benefit!” Why does he really want to spend time with his family? Does he want a Darwinian answer?

“If people like their family, they take good care of them, so their offspring live to reproduce and pass on the genes that make them like their family. So through the process of natural selection, you have evolved to like your family. By spending time with them, you’ll be fulfilling your inborn desire to enjoy their presence.”

“So what?”

Hmmm…maybe happiness is the answer.

“When you enjoy spending time with your family, you’ll be happy.”

“So what?”

What now? Do we need to get into the chemical basis of emotion to explain why we want to be happy? Do we need to go back to the Big Bang, or God?

Isn’t it a lot easier to just say “free shipping?” Why is it our place to tell people what that means for them? Allow me to quote myself from a comment I wrote a while back:

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but benefits are highly subjective, right? If we look at a steak, one person might benefit from the taste. Another person might benefit from the energy. Another person might benefit from the sensation of being full. Another person might experience a large negative benefit by being a vegetarian. Another person might think a steak is the perfect doorstop. We have no idea what the benefit is until we consider the specific person.”

I’m really more of a features guy

Why do I need to be sold on benefits? Yes, benefits are technically what we’re after. We don’t buy a steak just to bask in the glow of steak ownership, but because we want the benefits we get by eating it. However, features determine benefits, and the link is pretty clear.

Tell me the features and I can figure out the benefits (if I even care to). Tell me the benefits, and I have no way of figuring out the features. I’m not really interested in a salesman’s opinion of what a product’s benefits are to me. If he says “This product will make you happy,” how does he know? Why not just tell me exactly what it is, and let me decide what it does for me?

Everyone knows that Snickers is “packed with peanuts.” That’s the feature part of the tagline. Not as many people remember the benefit part of the tagline. But that’s OK–we know what peanuts are!

Once someone highly recommended a particular ebook to me, but I wasn’t sure about it. The sales page was pretty useless, just listing benefits. I’m sure the author thinks his ebook has many benefits, but would I agree with him? Against my better judgment, I bought it, and I was so disappointed I promptly returned it. Had the sales page listed the features (crap), I would have been able to figure out the benefits (none). But because it only listed the author’s opinion of the benefits, I couldn’t figure out the features, and therefore I couldn’t figure out the benefits from my perspective.

I guess benefits are helpful for things you don’t understand. If I’m sick and a doctor writes me a prescription for blahblahgra, that doesn’t mean anything to me. What will it do for me? What will it make me feel like, and how soon will it work? Still, I’d like to know the name of the drug, in case I ever come across something about it.

Sir James to the rescue

As you can see, I was pretty confused about this, and maybe you are too. But James Chartrand shed a lot of light on the subject for me. I’m quoting him here with permission. (You’ll have to pardon his French – figuratively, in this particular case for the French Canadian.)

“I think the problem is that you confuse benefits with goals. Let me see if I can help a bit with this, because I know it’s a tricky concept.

I want to walk in the rain. That’s my goal.

I need boots to do so. Any kind of boots? No. Rubber boots. Rubber is a feature.

Why do I need rubber? Because I want dry feet. Dry feet is a benefit. Not my goal, which is to walk in the rain.

So I go shopping for some boots. I see a pair. The tag says:

100% PVC
Red, blue or yellow
Inner Teflon liner
Wool padding

Well, that’s a bunch of features. Fucking boring, honestly. And I really don’t care. Why? Because my goal is to walk in the rain.

Then my eye catches another sign for another pair of rubber boots.

100% PVC for highest waterproof factor – your feet stay dry all the time!
Red, blue or yellow – walk in style and make sure you get noticed by the fashion crew!
Inner Teflon liner – extra waterproof prevention in case of leaks!
Wool padding – enjoy comfy, cozy feet while you walk!

That pair lists the features, but it also gives the benefits of that product. The manufacturer doesn’t know if my goal is walking in the rain, shoveling shit in a barn, emptying my basement of a flood or puddle jumping. Nor does the manufacturer care. He’s simply telling me WHY I should buy these boots by answering the question, ‘So what?’”

Well that clears up a lot! I had no idea that there was a third party here (goals). I thought anything related to “why” fell under benefits. But it works like this:

A customer has a goal. A product enables the goal. The product has features that describe it. Features have benefits that explain why the features matter.

When I see the feature “100% PVC,” I don’t know why that matters. But the benefit “highest waterproof factor – your feet stay dry all the time” tells me why it matters. Most of these features are jargon that doesn’t matter to most people, but the benefits tell you what you need to know. Even if the feature is self-explanatory, benefits give some emotional oomph.

But benefits alone aren’t enough. If it just said “your feet stay dry all the time” with nothing to back it up, you wouldn’t believe it. But it says “100% PVC,” and you might not know what that means, but it looks important enough to justify the benefit. And sophisticated boot aficionados may look for the “100% PVC” label.

Features and benefits, a match made in heaven.

I still think “free shipping” is pretty simple, but let’s benefit it up, shall we? Now I see that we don’t need to tie free shipping to a goal, as I thought before. We just need to remind the customer why free shipping is a good thing.

“Free shipping – you’ll have more money to buy all the great stuff you love!”

The feature isn’t linked to a goal, because I don’t need to know what they want to use the money for. The benefit just makes the feature more enticing by fleshing out what it means for the customer (even though they already know). Is that the right idea?

The plot thickens

But wait, there’s more to it than that. What about when someone asks “How would your product benefit me?” That’s a different kind of benefit, because it’s about what the product does for you, not why a feature matters.

When Philip Brewer wrote about how to launder money, he said that it took him a long time to understand money laundering because at first he didn’t realize that it refers to two completely different things:

1. Classic money laundering: converting dirty money into clean money. That is, hiding the illegal source of your income, without hiding the money itself. This is often done by creating a business that will claim the dirty money as legitimate revenue. For example, you can open a car wash, pour your illegal income into it, and simply pretend you washed more cars than you actually did.

2. Modern money laundering: hiding money from someone you don’t want to know about it, such as the IRS or an ex-spouse. First you make the money disappear, then you make it reappear in a way that it won’t be seen by who you’re hiding it from. You can make the money disappear in a safety deposit box or overseas bank. You can make it reappear by slowly withdrawing it over time, or by staging an invoice scam or fake casino win.

In a similar way, it appears that I’ve had a hard time understanding benefits, because the term refers to two completely different things:

1. Why a feature matters.

2. How the product will change the customer’s life.

We’ve covered the first one, but what about the second? Good sales copy is supposed to answer the “how will this change my life” question, but isn’t the answer obvious once you know enough about the product?

Going back to the boots, the customer may want more information than what’s on the sign. “Do these boots come in half sizes?” is a good question. “Do these boots have good traction on snow?” is a good question too. And “How long will these boots last?” is also a good question. But who asks “How will these boots benefit me?” Shouldn’t they know?

Forgive me, because I know every marketer in the world is going to have a heart attack when I say this, but once the customer has enough information, aren’t they the one who needs to decide how the product will benefit them? How would I know if the customer needs boots?

If they want to walk in the rain and they don’t have any waterproof footwear already, there’s probably a need there. If they want to lie in the sand at the beach, not so much. Then again, maybe they want the boots because they want to dress up like a Mighty Morphin Power Ranger. But only they know their situation. Aren’t they capable of figuring out if they need boots?

Of course, some cases are much more complicated. If someone’s car shopping, they might be confused about which of the billions of models out there best meets their needs, or what their needs even are. And car salesmen can afford to spend time helping them figure that out. But the customer still needs to provide some information, such as the fact that they want a reliable car with good safety features that can comfortably seat their family of five. It wouldn’t make much sense for someone to just stroll into a dealership, approach a salesman, point at a particular car, and ask “How will that car benefit me?”

Pop quiz: You’re thirsty. Do you want water? Yes or no? Or do you want to sit there pretending you don’t know how water will benefit you?

One main benefit

I hear a lot of people saying that a product needs to clearly present one main benefit. But why?

In some cases, this is no problem. “This pill will clear your sinuses and let you breathe easily.” Fine, but what about products that aren’t so simple?

Consider Steve Pavlina’s book Personal Development for Smart People. This book is not a solution to a specific problem. Instead, it’s about as high level as you can get, presenting the seven core principles of personal growth. The cover lists some things you can do with it, but they’re very broad, such as “achieve inspiring goals with disciplined daily habits” and “become the conscious creator of your life instead of feeling hopelessly adrift.” The focus is really on the seven principles themselves.

The book isn’t at all benefit-oriented, but it reached the Amazon top 100 before it even went to the printer. Of course, a lot of that is because of the huge audience he has at his blog. Still, I’d like to think that many people saw the value in a high level conceptual framework of personal growth, even if they couldn’t complete the sentence “I’m buying this book so I can ___________.”

Would the book have sold better if he had restricted it to one specific benefit? The cover says one of the things you’ll learn is how to “attract empowering relationships with loving, compatible partners.” What if he decided that the purpose of the book was to deliver that benefit? Well, going into the seven core principles of personal growth is a needlessly complicated way to get there. He might as well just write about relationships directly. But then, the book wouldn’t have been nearly as good, would it?

(Incidentally, have you noticed that ebooks tend to be much more benefit-oriented than printed books? What’s the benefit of Harry Potter?)

Why does everything need to be presented as a solution to an urgent problem? Sometimes abstract things have great value in themselves, regardless of their ability to achieve something tangible. Freedom, wisdom, knowledge, health, happiness, strength, relaxation, entertainment, humor, love – aren’t these things all inherently good, even if they don’t lead to something more concrete, like search engine traffic?

Besides, how often does a product actually deliver the ostensible benefit on a silver platter? As much as I liked Career Renegade, I’m sure that the author Jonathan Fields would agree that the book doesn’t instantly convert you into a career renegade just by reading it. It just provides a lot of guidance and resources to help you with the process. Not many products provide a magic solution.

Why we buy stuff

I told James that when SEO School came out, I didn’t bother trying to figure out the benefits. I just bought it right away because:

1. It’s an ebook. I like reading ebooks, unless something’s specifically wrong with them.
2. Naomi Dunford wrote it. The author is hugely important, because there’s a lot of junk out there.
3. It’s about SEO. That’s a decent topic, and while I didn’t really need it, I might learn something.
4. It has an affiliate program. I know a lot of people need to learn SEO, so it made sense to promote it.

It wasn’t any more complicated than that. I didn’t put up any irrational resistance to what was obviously a good product.

James pointed out that these are features, but I really bought the ebook for the benefits behind the features. Fine, these technically aren’t the reasons I bought it, they’re just convenient abstractions of the reasons. It’s a lot easier to say “because I like ebooks” or “because I like Naomi,” things I intuitively know are true, than to spell out the myriad of reasons behind them, some of which I might not even be aware of.

We often think in abstractions because breaking everything down to the molecular level is unnecessarily complicated. It’s much more natural to think “I want food” than to think “I want all the things food does for me, which I will now explain in great detail in case anyone needs proof of my desire for food…”

Do you need to have an inner monologue to debate the benefits of breasts, or do you just naturally like them? Feel free to substitute diamonds, shoes, ebooks, football, money, beaches, cats, your kids, or whatever you instinctively like without needing to convince yourself. Sure, you could probably come up with reasons to explain why you like these things, but you don’t need to. To you, these things obviously have intrinsic value, regardless of whether they enable you to solve a specific problem.

Bruce Springsteen did the Super Bowl halftime show. I never heard anyone ask “What’s the benefit of Bruce Springsteen?” People just knew they liked him, even without a long sales page to overcome their objections and prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he would change their life.

Why are some things so different? Why will someone gladly spend $100,000 on a college education because it’s “the normal thing to do,” blow $30,000 on a wedding reception because “it will be so wonderful,” then hesitate to buy a $12 ebook about how to reduce stress because they’re not entirely convinced about the benefits of a longer, happier life? All the time they spend trying to figure out whether they absolutely need it could be better spent buying and reading it.

The Architect would observe this person struggling with the decision to buy the ebook and say:

“Sales resistance is the most predictable of all human responses. It is interesting reading his reactions. The problem is choice. But we already know what he’s going to do, don’t we? Already I can see the chain reaction, the chemical precursors that signal the onset of emotion, designed specifically to overwhelm logic and reason. An emotion that is already blinding him from the simple and obvious truth: buying this product is the right thing to do. Why does he struggle to make his choice?”

The Oracle would respond:

“Because he didn’t come here to make his choice, he’s already made it. He’s here to try to understand why he made it.”

I have no idea what the benefits of reading this post are. I’ve certainly made no attempt to spell them out. And yet, you’re investing a certain amount of time in reading it, which is equivalent to a certain amount of cash that you’ve handed over without knowing exactly why. Don’t we sometimes buy things without caring what the benefits are, because we just intuitively know that they’re there?