Brand Benefits: What are they and how to find yours
Every brand has both functional and emotional benefits — which can lead to whether a customer chooses your product or another.
Here’s how to identify and leverage yours.
What makes a good brand? In previous posts, we’ve discussed why you need branding, how to use photography and videography to your benefit, and common branding mistakes to avoid.
Another critical piece of creating a powerful brand is identifying your brand benefits and effectively using them to build your brand.
What are brand benefits?
Think of your brand’s benefits as the positive transformations that occur when your customers work with your company or buy your product.
There are two different kinds of brand benefits, and each is important to building a strong brand.
Let’s look at each of them.
Functional Benefits
Your brand’s functional benefits are the practical advantages your customers gain by using your product or service. Another way to think of functional benefits is as the thing that fills your customer’s need.
When determining functional benefits, the goal is to identify what will have the most significant impact on your customers and differentiate you from the competition. However, because functional benefits are easily replicated and are often shared between competitors, they may not be your company’s most vital strategic advantage and can only take your brand so far.
Emotional Benefits
Your brand’s emotional benefits are subjective based on your customer’s feelings. These are the “feel good” benefits of your brand that add richness and depth to a customer’s experience, like an organic product or a free-trade label.
When determining your company’s emotional benefits, take a look at how customers feel about your service or products. Unlike functional benefits, emotional benefits can’t easily be copied by other companies because they stem from the relationship you’ve built with your customers. And, compared to functional benefits, people tend to pay more for emotional benefits because—for whatever reason—they have an attachment to the brand.
Leveraging your company’s benefits
Deciding which benefit to focus on is the first step to success. Emotional benefits are long-lasting. Once you make that impact with your customers, you are likely to keep their support for the foreseeable future. But if you don’t have that emotional bond with your customers, there is value in finding and focusing on your functional benefits first — offering a functional benefit that solves your customer’s problems may be an easy way to gain their trust and forge an emotional bond down the road.
The moral of the story is this: Find your brand benefits—the things your company does better than any other business—and own them. Whether they are functional connections or emotional ones, you can use them to your advantage and make them the cornerstone of your brand strategy.
image sources: nike.com , Editorial Credit: Boyloso / Shutterstock.com , Starbucks on twitter
