End users and distributors should recognize benefits within two to five seconds. How do you know it has an obvious benefit? When you can give it to someone and they immediately recognize the benefit without you saying anything. The more you have to explain your idea, the less obvious the benefit will be.

Why is an obvious benefit important? Unless you can afford a great advertising and marketing campaign, your product will need to be sold off a shelf with no one delivering a great sales pitch. The product needs to sell itself.

How obvious the benefit is is a subjective matter, which is why I have listed five success stories where the product sold itself. Compare the power of your benefit to the power of the benefits listed below. You may even want to sample the following products and have people evaluate how obvious the benefit of your product is compared to theirs.

Spanx, body shaping underwear

Sara Blakely did amateur comedy in her spare time and one night before going on stage she wore cream pants, but everything she wore underneath showed lines. She had already decided to wear open shoes, so she couldn’t wear pantyhose either. Out of options, Blakely cut off her pantyhose feet and took the stage. Her legs kept rolling over her, but she realized she had a great idea: footless pantyhose. He launched his company, Spanx, which has become a great success. Their product line had expanded far beyond footless pantyhose to a full line of body-shaping underwear (even for men) – not girdles, but firm enough that many users claim they lose two inches when they use them. Spanx comes in a variety of shapes, ranging from bra line to thigh, and softens the look of all underwear and shapes the body to look its best in almost any outfit.

Blakely really had a hard time convincing the manufacturers (who were all men) that women would want their product. After hearing that many times, he finally met a manufacturer who initially told him no, but after showing the product to his daughters, he called Blakely and said that although he personally thought the idea was strange, his daughters thought that was the best idea. that they had ever seen.

Panty lines are a problem that most, if not all, women have faced. Also, many women are always looking for ways to look their best. When presented with a product that can cover the lines of the panties, even with open shoes, and at the same time shape their bodies, women instantly understand the benefit. It is this instant recognition of the benefits, coupled with state-of-the-art and effective marketing and packaging, that has made Spanx the huge success it is today.

Mountain boards – Snow boards with wheels

Jason Lee and Patrick McConnell didn’t benefit from solving a problem; your benefit by giving users exactly what they wanted: extreme danger. Adding big wheels to a snowboard and then calling it a mountain board, with the mobility to go down the mountain at unheard of speeds, was just what your crazy everyday snowboarder was looking for in the more tame months of summer. They launched the product after the year’s snow melted and it had more than a million dollars in sales before the year was out.

Lee and McConnell knew what daredevils wanted, because they were daredevils themselves. They opted for a fast and furious product that their target customers would immediately engage with. The main benefit is that the Mountain Board gives daredevils more opportunities to live their creed all year long, meaning we could live or die, but we’ll have fun in the meantime.

The clean shower: a household name

Robert Black was a retired chemist living in Florida where the water is bad and leaves a crusty film on the shower wall. Black didn’t care, but his wife did, and she was after him all the time to find a solution that would keep the shower clean. Black worked for a few years and then had a solution, a simple spray that could be used after a shower that kept the shower walls perfectly clean. Black put out the product on its own and was selling more than $ 100 million per year before Proctor and Gamble bought it.

Black learned that what counts for an obvious benefit is not so much the product itself, but how end users perceive the problem the product is going to solve. If the product addresses an issue that is known and important to users, you will have a product that will communicate great benefit to end users.

The Java Jacket – One of my favorite stories

When Jay Sorenson bought coffee from convenience stores and coffee shops, it was always too hot to fit in a single disposable cup. He noticed that many people used two cups so that they could handle their coffee without burning their hands. Then Sorenson came up with the original idea for the small piece of corrugated cardboard that will fit over a coffee mug and keep your hand cool. The benefit is obvious to end users, but Sorenson did not need to sell the product to end users, but to convenience stores and coffee shops. In addition, its customers (convenience stores and coffee shops) did not sell the product to end users, but instead gave the product away. How could Sorenson convince potential customers to buy from you? He had to find the benefit that made sense to his potential customers. Their Java Jacket cost only half the cost of an empty coffee cup, so their customers could cut their costs from a double cup to a Java Jacket and a single cup. That benefit is obvious, easy to understand, and important. Shortly after introducing the product, Sorenson was selling more than $ 16 million a year.

Do not always assume that the benefit is only for the end user. The benefits to the distribution channel can be as important as they are powerful. Better packaging, better conditions, and easier-to-manage product lines are important benefits for the distribution channel, and companies spend as much time looking for benefits in the distribution channel as they do looking for benefits for end users.

CD and DVD repairs

Have you ever skipped a CD or DVD or played a very distorted sound or picture? Well that can be easily repaired because the electronic signal is rarely distorted, rather the optical layer is damaged. Fix the optical coat and that $ 15 to $ 20 CD or DVD will be like new. Daniel Henry knew it and put together the first optical repair kit called Wipe Out and was ready to go. But at first the sales were a big failure. A huge benefit and people wouldn’t buy. Why, they didn’t know that CDs and DVDs could be repaired. They thought it was a hoax. Again, the obvious benefit is not due to the product, but to the end-user perceptions of your product or your issue.

Henry bounced back by running a major advertising program for key magazine publishers, sending out free samples and telling publishers to try to repair their damaged CDs and DVDs. They tested the product, it worked, and widely praised the product in print, leading to huge Wipe Out sales. With the endorsements on the package, consumers began to believe the claims and the product was a huge success.

How to proceed

When you start evaluating whether your product has a really obvious benefit, don’t focus on the product, focus on the problem or situation the product addresses. Ask people if they experience the problem you are addressing and see how they describe it. Eric Teng, who created Garlic Twist, a new and easier way to mince garlic, began by asking people if they ever used a garlic press, the old-fashioned way of mincing garlic, and if they did, how they felt it worked and what They thought it could be done to improve the product. When one person after another complained to the press, Teng knew he had a winner, and his product sales of more than $ 600,000 a year prove that the Garlic Twists profit is truly obvious.

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