Seven Reasons to Strengthen Your Customer Benefits Focus

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Seven Reasons to Strengthen Your Customer Benefits Focus

By Allen Weiss and Deborah J. MacInnis | MIT Sloan Management Review | August 01, 2024

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Benefits are the desirable outcomes that customers receive from your brand. This definition holds true regardless of whether customers are in B2B or B2C spaces and whether the organization is a company, nonprofit, or sole proprietor offering a product, a service, or an experience. Benefits help customers reach their goals and reduce their pains.

Focusing on the benefits customers genuinely want offers a straightforward path for companies to design, market, and deliver their products and services, and to grow strategically in ways that resonate deeply with their target customers. For marketing executives, this path is also highly actionable: A focus on customer benefits lets a company examine its entire set of strategic decisions through the lens of benefits. Here are seven compelling reasons why customer benefits should be a central concern of your company.

1. To avoid marketing myopia. Marketing myopia happens when organizations focus on a product, industry, vertical, or demographic instead of the benefits that customers want.  Companies that regularly look to understand the benefits their customers want and that are willing to reexamine their business practices are less likely to get blindsided by market evolution.
2. To identify potential competitors.  Focusing on customer benefits changes your perspective on where prospective competitors might come from, especially with regard to the threat of new entrants and the threat of substitute products.
3. To see paths to growth. A benefits perspective helps companies grow by extending a given benefit to a new product category or providing different types of benefits. Functional benefits provide solutions to problems so that customers feel that they have the efficacy to control their environments.  However, customers also value experiential and symbolic benefits. Experiential benefits engage customers’ senses, minds, and hearts, inducing feelings such as excitement, sensory pleasure, engagement, relaxation, or awe. Symbolic benefits enhance people’s feelings of belonging, status, or connectedness, or that they’re acting in a values-congruent way.  Many companies, if they focus on benefits at all, emphasize functional benefits and give short shrift to experiential and symbolic benefits. 
4. To develop new products. A benefits focus also facilitates new product development. When ChatGPT took off in the mainstream market in November 2023, the benefits were not new. Natural language processing and artificial intelligence technologies had been around for years, in products like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, for example. However, ChatGPT launched with a website that promoted the functional benefits of ease of use, increased productivity, and humanlike interaction.
5. To understand shocks and trends. Shocks are events that can affect what benefits customers want or how important existing benefits are to them. Shocks are like earthquakes: They send out tremors that rattle the status quo.
6. To help companies financially. When companies offer the functional, experiential, and symbolic benefits that customers want, customers are more likely to become loyal to the brand and advocate on its behalf.
7. To help develop core competencies. Focusing on customer benefits is also consistent with work on an organization’s core competencies. Core competencies assist an organization in distinguishing its brands from those of its competitors and reducing costs more than competitors do, thereby attaining a competitive advantage.

3 key takeaways from the article

1. Benefits are the desirable outcomes that customers receive from your brand. This definition holds true regardless of whether customers are in B2B or B2C spaces and whether the organization is a company, nonprofit, or sole proprietor offering a product, a service, or an experience. Benefits help customers reach their goals and reduce their pains.
2. Focusing on the benefits customers genuinely want offers a straightforward path for companies to design, market, and deliver their products and services, and to grow strategically in ways that resonate deeply with their target customers.
3. Seven compelling reasons why customer benefits should be a central concern of your company are:  to avoid marketing myopia, to identify potential competitors, to see paths to growth, to develop new products, to understand shocks and trends, to help companies financially, and to help develop core competencies.

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Topics:  Strategy, Marketing, Business Model, Marketing Myopia, Customers Benefits, Customers Loyalty