What is the brand benefit? The Benefit or promise your brand makes is part of the Copy Strategy and it should convince users to prefer it. For instance:
[BRAND X] is a {PKT CATEGORY} which keeps today‘s clothes looking their best longer.
Strong brand benefits, aka brand promise, are:
- Important. If customers don’t value the benefit(s) your brand offers your advertising sucks.
- Unique and distinctive. Copycats don’t deliver.
- Sharp, limited, and real. Brands can’t be everything to everyone. Be choosy about customers and give them what they need, even if they do not know yet they need it.
Perhaps it is the uniqueness the least easy to grasp element for some marketers. Being unique means being different from all other competitors. It means your product performs in a way competitors cannot exceed when satisfying a given user need, in our example it is: Clothes looking their best longer. But you can make a statement like this only if you can objectively measure the performance you claim, and you do so with lab tests.
Brand communication is too important to rely on one’s gut: ask the customer to find out what’s really relevant. But don’t expect her to tell you what she wants. Ask instead if she likes the solution you found to her problem, and marketing research is the tool of choice.
Not all products have a benefit to offer. Biscuits, fragrances, yogurts, alcoholic beverages, coffee, cigars, mattresses, socks, and so on, may be difficult to differentiate from competing brands according to the benefit they offer. In these cases the copy strategy should exploit its other two pivotal elements: Reason why and Brand character.
