Leading with Features: When It's the Right Strategy.
The Surprising Impact of Feature-Focused Messaging.
When Humane announced their first AI-powered hardware, the Ai Pin, they defied the traditional rules of messaging. They launched with a long demo heavily focused on features, offering limited insight into benefits, and lacked clarity on what Ai Pin is and its purpose.
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Despite this break from the norm, I'm a big fan of this strategy.
💡 Here's Why: Products, especially in tech, first attract a unique audience: the innovators and early adopters. These folks love details. They dive into features, figuring out how these can be leveraged for their needs.
🌉 Bridging the Gap: Innovators and early adopters are like scouts. They explore the features, test them, and imagine possibilities. Their feedback becomes key in bridging to the next group: the early majority. This is where the majority starts needing more than just features; they need to know the benefits and the value.
🔍 The Shift: Initially, if your product is groundbreaking, different, and you can find these early adopters (about 16% of the market), feature-led messaging works. But this is just the start.
📊 For the rest, the 84%, it's a different game. They need to see the benefits, the impact, and real-life success stories. This is where product marketing comes into play, transforming feature descriptions into stories of value and benefits.
🔁 It's a Cycle: As a product marketing leader, it's about knowing when to switch gears. Start with features to attract the pioneers and then gradually shift to benefits to appeal to the wider audience.
🌟 So, what's the takeaway? Not all products should lead with benefits right away. Understand your audience, especially those early adopters. They might just be the key to articulate the value that will unlock your product's full potential in the market.
Note: Everett Rodgers created the Technology Adoption Lifecycle back in 1963. Geoffrey Moore introduced the ‘Chasm’ that I took the liberty to call ‘a gap’ in my version of his classic book ‘Crossing the Chasm’. Bruce Cleveland and Geoffrey Moore created a comparison between ‘The Chasm’ and ‘The Gap’ that can be downloaded from www.tractiongap.com
Leading with Outcomes: When It's the Right Strategy.
Don’t lead with features (12mg Melatonin, 100% drug free, extra strength), not even with benefits (calms the body). Lead with the outcome (restful sleep). This strategy is effective when customers are uncertain about the solution that will address their needs. For instance, the right-hand product assumes people understand what melatonin is. However, it f…