Persuasive Advertising - J. Scott Armstrong [21]
1.1.1. Describe specific, meaningful benefits
Every year people buy millions of quarter-inch drill bits—not because they want quarter-inch drill bits, but because they want quarter-inch holes.
Old adage
Describe specific meaningful benefits early in the ad, especially if the benefits of the product are not already known to people in the target market. This helps people to quickly see whether the ad is relevant to them.
Benefits are not always easy to communicate. For example, how would you advertise the benefits of first-class travel on an airline? Bill Bernbach did it for American Airlines by using a full-page print ad with this headline: “Why generals always had a tent of their own.” The ad went on to say, “The privacy, the roominess, the comfort, and the overall atmosphere ease the burden of travel for men under pressure.”
Advertisements that call attention to product features can be persuasive when those features are obviously related to benefits. This is especially true when those features are unique.
If the benefits are not immediately obvious from a product’s features, the ad should explain the linkage. Bernbach’s Volkswagen Beetle ads showed how features relate to benefits in their ad with the headline, “In 1949 we sold 2 Volkswagens in the U.S.A.” The copy stated:
What a kidding the drivers of those two Volkswagens must have taken. But they had something to sustain them. …An engine in the rear that carried them (and their stranded neighbors) up icy hills. An air-cooled engine that never boiled over or froze …
In 1972, Procter & Gamble (P&G) was preparing to launch its Dawn liquid dishwashing detergent. Its management debated whether to advertise Dawn’s “superior cleaning ability” or a specific benefit, its “grease cutting action.” “Grease cutting action” won the debate, and the campaign seemed to go well.
McNeil Nutritionals focused advertising for its Splenda no-calorie sweetener on the product’s use of sugar because the taste benefit of sugar is well established. Its advertising strategy—“Made from sugar so it tastes like sugar”—was so successful over the 2003–05 period that competitors filed at least five lawsuits to ban the company from saying that Splenda is made from sugar. As of July 2009, the Splenda tagline said: “It starts with sugar. It tastes like sugar. But its not sugar.”
Some ads do not follow this principle. For example, a March 2006 Delta Airlines ad had this mysterious headline, “Buy a bigger memory card.” An ad for a laxative warned: “In today’s environment, even man could become an endangered species” (Antin 1993, p. 31).
In the 1900s, of the ads in the top ten U.S. magazines, 61 percent mentioned benefits (Pollay 1985). Almost 70 percent of TV commercials mentioned benefits in the early1980s (Stewart and Furse 1986).
While ads often mention benefits, many of them fail to make the benefits specific. Sandeep Patnaik and I analyzed the 480 full-page print ads provided in the Which Ad Pulled Best (WAPB) series of books (see Burton and Purvis in the References). While 70 percent mentioned meaningful benefits, only 44 percent of these mentioned specific benefits. Thus, only 31 percent of all the ads mentioned specific meaningful benefits.
Evidence on the value of advertising specific meaningful benefits
Here is our first report on the WAPB “quasi-field-experiment data:”1
Print ads mentioning benefits produced better recall, especially when the benefits were specific. Our WAPB analysis found 42 pairs of print ads in which one ad included benefits, while the other did not. For example, a Visa ad that offered specific benefits, such as global acceptance of the card and a refund in case of loss, elicited better recall than a Visa ad that showed