How to find your brand’s functional and emotional benefits

In the new economy, Brand Love is the new currency, with marketing shifting to building big ideas, leveraging purpose-driven stories that are in the moment, creating consumer experiences that people talk about, managing ubiquitous purchase moments all helping to steer the brand’s reputation. Marketing has to focus on creating a brand reputation with consumers, and equally creating an organizational culture that reflects the brand’s soul. Instead of shouting your message at every consumers, the best brands confidently whisper to those most motivated by what they do, who then scream with influence to their friends. In the new world, the best brands now fight for a place in the minds and hearts of consumers.

Brands need to be better, different, cheaper or not around for very long.

One of the biggest mistakes that brands make is “yelling at” the consumer with features (what you do) rather than “speaking with” the consumer, about the functional benefits (what they get) and the emotional benefits (how they feel). Watch half an hour of TV one night and you will see brand after brand yelling at the consumer. Feature after feature after feature. This type of Marketing just forces the consumer to have to figure out what they get from your brand. In a crowded media world where consumers see 7,000 brand messages per day, you have just lost out on the opportunity to find a set of consumer oriented benefits that your brand can use to motivate the consumer and own as you build the reputation of your brand.

Brands have to stand out or die. If we look the chart below, the Winning Zone for your brand forces you to think about finding the ideal space where your brand matches up to a distinct consumer need better than anyone else. If not, your brand won’t be around for very long. You should avoid competing in the Losing Zone, which goes head to head with a competitor that can deliver the consumer needs better than you can. The area with the yellow arrow is the Risky Zone is a relative tie with your competitor. You can win the tie is by being first, being more innovative and creative or by finding the right emotional connection that makes the functional tie less relevant to the consumer decisions. Avoid the Dumb Zone, where you wage a competitive battle in a space that the consumer does not care about. When you find yourself competing in this space, you will find yourself eventually just talking to yourself. 

Finding your brand’s core strength

While the temptation for most Marketers is to do a little of everything, it is the best Marketers who come to a decision point and make the tough choice by picking one. Most of our tools are forced decision-making tools that will help the debate and guide your focus. When it comes to the core strength of your brand, we give you four choices: product, promise, experience or price. Many brand leaders have their marketing strategy wrong, simply because they don’t know their core strength.

Here’s a simple little game that we play with executive teams. We provide them with 4 chips against the 4 choices of product, promise, experience or price. They have to put one chip on the one choice they believe they have the highest potential to win behind, two chips at the mid level and then force one chip to be at the low level. Try it and you will be surprised that your team will struggle to agree. You may also find that you are at one strength now and figure that your brand has matured and it might be the right time to shift your brand marketing to become focused on something else. For instance, many brands start off as products and then move to either building a promise or an experience. 

• Product: Your main strategy should focus on being better. You have to invest in Innovation to stay ahead of competitors, remaining the superior choice in the category. The classic product brands in the market include Samsung, Tide, Ruth’s Chris, Google, Rolex and Five Guys.
• Promise: Your strategy should focus on being different. To tell that story, you need to invest in emotional brand communication. You want to connect consumers on a deep emotional level with the concept. The promise brands in the market include Apple, Nike, Tesla, Virgin and Dove.
• Experience: your strategy and organization should focus on linking culture very closely to your brand. After all, your people are your product. As you go to market, invest in influencer and social media that can help support and spread the word of your experience. The experience brands in the market include Starbucks, Amazon, AirBnB, Ritz-Carlton, Netflix and Emirates airlines.
• Price: focus on efficiency and drive low-cost into the products you sell and high turns and high volume. You have to be better at the fundamentals around production and sourcing. The price brands include Walmart, Kia, Expedia, McDonald’s, Old Navy and Payless shoes.

Just like any decision, it is hard to just pick one. Each has a different focus of investment and a different type of selling and marketing that is required to be successful. The problem is that brands that fail to realize who they are will start to apply the wrong strategy to the wrong brand situation. Many brands choose to be a little both. These brands end up with a confused internal organization and a confused external consumer reputation.

Consumer Benefits Ladder

The next decision is the main benefit you want to focus on. Doing a Consumer Benefits Ladder helps to organize your thinking as a great tool for bringing the benefits to life.

The best way to work the Consumer Benefits Ladder is to hold a brainstorming session with everyone who works on the brand so you can:

1. Leverage all the available research to brief the team, helping define the consumer target and get all the consumer insights and need states out.
2. List out all the features that your brand offers, and the brand assets it brings to the table. Make sure that these features are competitive advantages.
3. Find the functional benefit by putting yourself in the shoes of the consumer and seeing the brand features from their eyes: start asking yourself over and over “so if I’m the consumer, what do I get from that?”. Ask up to 5 times and push the answers into a richer zone.
4. Then find the emotional benefit by asking “so how does that make me feel?” As you did above, keep asking, and you’ll begin to see a deeper emotional space you can play in and own.

What are the functional benefits?

To help brand leaders, we have mapped out 9 functional benefit zones and then expanded that to 50 overall functional benefits. As you look through the list, start matching up those benefits that you think will be something consumers want, something that can be unique for your brand and something you can own in the future. 

What are the emotional benefits?

From my experience, Marketers are better at the rational benefits than they are at the emotional benefits. I swear every brand out there thinks their brand should be the trusted, reliable and yet like-able brand. As a brand, you want to own the emotional space in the consumer’s heart as much as you own the rational space in the consumer’s mind. It seems that not only do consumers have a hard time expressing their emotions about a brand, but so do Brand Managers. Companies like Hotspex have mapped out all the emotional zones for consumers. I’m not a researcher, but if you are interested in this methodology contact Hotspex at https://www.hotspex.biz 

We have taken this research method and created an Emotional Cheat Sheet for Brand Leaders. This lists out the 8 major emotional consumer zones, optimism, freedom, being noticed, being liked, comfort, be myself, be in control and knowledge. 

To own a space in the consumer’s heart, you want to own and dominate one of zones, always thinking relation to what your competitor may own. Do not choose a list of emotions from all over the map, or you will just confuse your consumer as much as trying to own a long list of rational benefits. Once you narrow the major emotional zone you can own, you can use the supporting words of the Emotional Cheat Sheet to add flavor.

Build your brands around clusters of benefits

As you are looking for the benefits to that your brand stand behind, we recommend that you look at clusters of the functional and emotional benefits, that you believe match up with what consumers want and what your brand does better than other competitors. 

Look at our example below, we have mapped out the positioning clusters of three distinct car brands (Volvo, Honda, Ferrari) to showcase how different the functional and emotional benefits. 

• The Volvo brand is notorious for safety, but can also look at quality and how it is made as part of the “Works Better” functional benefit zone. Volvo also makes you smarter and helps your family. The emotional zones where Volvo wins is in are being in control and curious for knowledge. 
• The Honda mini-van is all about family and value for money. Its functionality also can simplify your life. As it is a family car, the emotional zones that Honda can win are being myself and comfort. 
• The Ferrari brand is built around speed and performance, part of the “works better” functional benefit zone. The brand also delivers against experience and sensory appeal. 

Sorting the benefits

When we brainstorm around a given brand, we normally end up with too much information. Building on the work from the cluster of benefits to the Consumer Benefit Ladder, we see this type of output for our fictional Gray’s Cookie brand. 

Following this brainstorm, there are way too many potential benefits to really begin building your brand. You can use your working knowledge of the brand to begin looking at which of the functional and emotional benefits will help your brand win in the market. 

Then use Market Research with consumers to sort through the possible benefits to find the ones that are the most motivating to consumers and own-able for your brand. The grid we use looks at two dimensions: 

1. How motivated consumers are by the benefit
2. How own-able is this benefit for you brand. 

Looking at the grid below, you want to focus and build your brand around those consumer benefits that land in the highly motivating and highly own-able quadrant. This Winning Zone matches up to the venn diagram we showed earlier. Avoid the losing and dumb zones while any benefits that end up in the risky zone will require speed to market, more creativity and emotional marketing.  

Looking at the Gray’s Cookie example, we can see how “guilt free alternative” consumer benefit has the highest potential to motivate consumers and the highest potential for ownership by the brand. The benefits of “new favorite cookie” are highly motivating, but would be owned by the major mass brands in the category. 

Support points to the main benefit

I took one logic class at University and sat there for 13 straight weeks of premise-premise conclusion. Easy class, but the lesson has stuck with me:

• All fish live in water (premise)
• Tuna are fish (premise)
• Therefore, tuna live in the water (conclusion)

In a positioning statement, the main consumer benefit would be the conclusion. And the reason to believe (RTB) would be the supporting premise. I say this for a few reasons. First, the RTB should never be the conclusion. The consumer doesn’t care about what you do, until they get something from it. The benefit has to come from being the consumers’ shoes to realize what they get and how it makes them feel. Second, if pure logic teaches two premises are enough to draw any conclusion, then you really only need two RTBs. Brands with a laundry list of RTBs are not doing their job in making a decision on what the best support points are. You either force the ad agency to decide what are the most important or the consumer to decide. By deferring, you’re weakening your argument. 

Claims can be an effective tool in helping to support your Reason to believe. We look at four types of claims: process, product, third person and behavioral.

Process

• Detail how your product works differently
• Showcase your point of difference in the production process.
• What do you do differently within the production process
• What added service/details do you provide in the value chain

Product

• Usage of an ingredient that makes you bette
• Process or ingredient that makes you safer

Third person

• Experts in the field who can speak on the brand’s behalf.
• Past users/clients with proof support of their stories.

Behavioral

• Clinical tests
• In market usage study

Before and after studies

Bring the 4 elements together to create a winning Brand Positioning statement

After doing all the homework, you should be able to put together a winning Brand Positioning Statement that addresses: 

1. Who is in the consumer target? What slice of the population will be the most motivated to buy what you do? The first thing to decide is the consumer target, which should be your first point of focus, so that you can find the slice of the population that will be the most motivated by what you do. The mistake for many Marketers is they think about who you want, and they forget to ask who wants you. Who is the most motivated to buy what you do? 
2. Where do you play? What is the frame of reference that helps to define the space in the marketplace that you compete in? We then frame the positioning by determining the category you play in, defining the competitors you will position yourself against. No one really operates in a blue ocean space, as positioning is always relative to some other choice the consumer can make.
3. Where do you win? We then need to determine the main promise you will make to the consumer target, in the sense of a benefit for the consumer, both the rational and emotional. Think about what does the customer get, and how does it make them feel? 
4. Why should they believe us? Finally, we will look to understand what support points are needed to back up the main promise you are making. These support points have to support the main benefit, not just random claims or features that you want to jam into your brand message.

Moving from the brainstorm of the Consumer Benefit Ladder, using the research to focus on “Guilt Free Cookie” as the most motivating and own-able benefit, we can see the final brand positioning statement for Gray’s Cookies.

To learn more about how to write positioning statements, here is our workshop that we run for organizations:

Beloved Brands: Who are we?

At Beloved Brands, we will make your brand stronger and your brand leaders smarter. We lead workshops to define your brand, helping you uncover a unique, own-able Brand Positioning Statement and an organizing Big Idea that transforms your brand’s DNA into a consumer-centric and winning brand reputation. We lead workshops to build a strategic Brand Plan that will optimize your resources and motivates everyone that touches the brand to follow the plan. We coach on Marketing execution, helping build programs that create a bond with your consumers, to ensure your investment drives growth on your brand. We will build a Brand Management Training Program, so you can unleash the full potential of your Marketing team, enabling them to contribute smart and exceptional Marketing work that drives brand growth. We cover strategic thinking, analytics, brand planning, brand positioning, creative briefs, customer marketing and marketing execution. 

Beloved Brands Training program

At Beloved Brands, we can build a Brand Management Training Program, to unleash the full potential of your Marketing team

1. How to think strategically: We believe that Strategic Thinking is an essential foundation, to help Marketers ask big questions that challenge and focus brand decisions. We teach the value of asking good questions, using four interruptive questions to help frame your brand’s strategy, looking at your competitive position, your brand’s core strength, the connectivity with your consumer and the internal situation your brand faces. 
2. Write smarter Brand Plans: We demonstrate how to write each component of the Brand Plan, looking at brand vision, purpose, values, goals, key Issues, strategies and tactics. We provide a full mock brand plan, with a framework for you to use on your own brand. We show how to build Marketing Execution plans as part of the overall brand plan, looking at a Brand Communications Plan, Innovation Plan, In-store plan and Experiential plan. This gives the strategic direction to everyone in the organization.
3. Create winning Brand Positioning Statements: We show how to write a classic Brand Positioning statement with four key elements: target market, competitive set, main benefit and reason to believe (RTBs). We then show how to build an Organizing Big Idea that leads every aspect of your brand, including promise, story, innovation, purchase moment and experience. 
4. Write smarter Creative Briefs: The Creative Brief frames the strategy and positioning so your Agency can creatively express the brand promise through communication. The hands-on Creative Brief workshop explores best in class methods for writing the brief’s objective, target market, consumer insights, main message stimulus and the desired consumer response.
5. Be smarter at Brand Analytics: We show how to build a deep-dive business review on the brand, looking at the category, consumers, competitors, channels and brand. We start with the smart analytical principles that will challenge your thinking and help you gain more support by telling analytical stories through data. We teach how to turn your analysis into a presentation for management, showing the ideal presentation slide format.
6. Get better Marketing Execution: We provide Brand Leaders with tools and techniques for judging communication concepts from your agencies, as well as processes for making decisions and providing effective feedback. We teach how to make marketing decisions with the ABC’S, so you can choose great ads and reject bad ads looking at tools such as Attention (A), Branding (B), Communication (C) and Stickiness (S). We teach how to provide copy direction that inspires and challenges the agency to deliver great execution.
7. How to build Media Plans: We look at media as an investment and as a brand growth strategy, exploring various media options—both traditional and on-line. We bring a more consumer centric approach to media, aligning the media choices to where your consumer will be most likely to engage with your brand message. We look at all the types of Media through the lens of the Brand Leader, with advice on how to use traditional media options, such as TV, radio, newspaper, out-of-home and Modern media options such as digital, social and search.
8. Winning the Purchase Moment: We provide brand leaders with analytics, planning and decision making tools to help their instincts and judgement for moving consumers to purchase. Complete in-store business review, looking at categories, consumer shopping behavior, competitors, customers and the overall brand performance. We teach the basics of customer marketing planning, identifying the target consumer, in-store messages, strategies, tactics and project management. We look at the available tools for customer marketing including pricing, promotions, retail shelf management, merchandising and operational execution.