The difference between features, values and benefits

Every piece of effective marketing should answer these 3 questions:

🛠 FEATURES - What are you offering?
✅ BENEFITS - What’s in it for me?
✨ VALUES - Why should I care?

🛠 FEATURES are the easiest to nail down.

It’s whether a chair is red leather or grey polyester, or the bed is a twin-size or a queen.

Features are easy because we can typically see them and experience them first-hand.

And then things get tricky.

✅ BENEFITS need to appeal to the specific customer or client. The startup founder, the part-time nanny, the website developer.

Benefits answer the question “what can this thing do for me specially?”

✨ VALUES are the trickiest, but most important to get right.

Everyone has a set of worldviews, beliefs and personal philosophies that guide the way we make decisions today.

When marketing appeals to our emotions it taps in to our aspirational natures. To be a better parent, to be more confident at work, or to spend more time with the people we care about the most.

So when in doubt, choose values.

❤️ Because people respond to emotion, not feature lists.