Analyzing your products

When consumers use a product or service, they do so because they seek the bundle of benefits that a particular product or service delivers. As part of your marketing plan, you need to analyze how your products and services do that using a tool called Feature Benefit Laddering. Take a look at this example. Think of the steps of a ladder. At the bottom rung is your product, then right above that are its main features. Then above each feature is the primary benefit it delivers. Keep going until you reach the ultimate value that those benefits deliver. Let’s create a feature benefit ladder for a simple men’s wallet. You start by listing all the product’s features along the bottom. So as you see here, you would include things like the front, the back, the fold, and so on. Then for each feature, you write the benefit it delivers. For each benefit, you list the value it delivers. And by value I mean the motivation a consumer would have for wanting the product. Our completed ladder looks like this. It’s a bit like unpacking your product or service so you can see what the various features actually deliver. Next, you need to test each feature of your product compared to the same feature on your competitor’s products. You need to determine which features perform better than the competition, which perform the same, and which perform not as well. Are there features that need to be improved? Are there certain competitors you want to avoid or possibly go after based on product performance? Now the key is to choose a high performing feature and its benefits to base your marketing strategy on. Here’s why. When you outperform the competition on a feature that is important to consumers, and they know about it, guess what happens? You earn a lot of customers.