WII.FM is everyone’s favorite radio station – What’s In It For Me? What you sell doesn’t matter. Potential customers could care less about the features of your product or service. They only care about how it benefits their lives. Your product is a solution, designed to solve a problem in their lives. As such, when it comes to your market, the main thing on your mind should be the benefits you give customers. Are you entertaining them? Giving them bragging rights? Making them more productive? To understand benefits, you have to understand the pain that you reduce or eliminate.
Because benefits are so important, be sure to include both features and benefits when you do a competitive analysis. By including benefits, you’ll get a much more insightful and actionable comparison. Obviously, different customer segments will have different priorities as to what benefits are most important to them, so potential third dimension in your analysis would be the customer segment. From there, identify the segment that most values your differentiation – often the highest willingness to pay – and you’ve got your beachhead market.
