Product Attributes and Benefits: Key

to Understanding Your Customers

What are product attributes and benefits? Believe it or not, but they are the
source of academic research and marketing studies...

Which of these statements do you agree with?

I sell and promote my products:

A. Based on their features.

B. Based on how they contribute my customers’ lives.

If you agree with statement A, then you are selling product attributes. If
you agree with statement B, then you are selling product benefits.

But while these definitions may seem straightforward, there’s much more to
product attributes and benefits than meets the eye.

I propose a third statement:

C. I sell and promote my products’ features based on how they benefit the
lives of my customers.

I probably don’t have to tell you how statement C is something every retailer
strives towards. But to keep things easy, this article will explore the
definitions of product attributes and benefits so that you can get it right
once and for all.

I’ll also show you why statement C is the future of retail marketing.

Here’s what this article will cover:

1. What are product attributes and benefits?

2. What’s the importance of product attributes and benefits?
3. How do you find the benefits of your attributes?
4. How to bring product-centricity (attributes) together with customer-
centricity (benefits)

Let’s jump straight in.

What are product attributes and benefits?

Product attributes are the components of a product that describe its
features. Product attributes are concrete, objective, and can be observed.

The attributes of a product don’t change. But which attributes you choose
to show will vary depending on campaign, customer, or brand.
E.g., Product attributes of a shoe are the special components that the shoe
is made from.

Product benefits, on the other hand, are the features that are most
important to the customer. More often than not these are conceptual and
change according to the individual shopper or customer segment.

For the example above, this would be:

Water Repellent: Shoes that can bear any weather rain or shine.
Extra Cushioning: No sore feet at the end of the day, because these
sneakers are extra comfortable.
Breathable Fabric: Perfect for a hot day, working out, or simply walking
the extra mile.

You get the idea.

Let’s take a look at an example of an eCommerce store that differentiates

between attributes and benefits.

Samsung is selling earbuds that are “wireless”, “black”, and have a “charging
case”. These are product attributes. On the PDP for those earbuds, they
actually separate the attributes from the benefits.

According to Wu, Day, and MacKay (1988), distinguishing between attributes

and benefits, offers opportunities to study consumer preferences.
Separating attributes from benefits on your webshop will help you
understand which sections drive purchase behavior.

So Samsung has a separate “benefits” section. And when you click on it,
you’re directed down the PDP to a product description that highlights how
the consumer can listen to “the music [they] love” whilst “walking, working
or working out”.
Click on the section “benefits” or keep scrolling down the PDP and you see
many benefits that different product features can provide, depending on the
shoppers' needs.

Samsung chooses to differentiate between the two as a good way to get to

the bottom of their customer’s preferences and shopping choices.

What about marketing campaigns?

Well, for campaigns and ads, Hernandez, Wright, and Rodrigues (2014) also
differentiate between “benefit-appeal” copy (e.g., values, abstraction, and
ends) and “attribute-appeal” copy (e.g., details, concreteness, and
means).

A famous example that the paper references is the 2002 Burger King ad
copy that changed from “now you can pay rent and eat” - emphasizing a
benefit - to “items starting at $1”, which emphasized an attribute.
Burger King ad from 2002 emphasizes the benefit of “paying rent”.

The paper found that benefit vs. attribute appeals will resonate for
consumers depending on their construal levels...but that’s a big theory for
another article.

To sum up -

The point Hernandez, Wright, and Rodriguez make is a good way to

differentiate between product attributes and benefits:

Attributes are detailed/objective facts like color, price, material, shape,

etc.
Benefits are often imagined effects like paying rent in the future,
satisfaction, happiness, status, beauty, etc.

However, in the end, both attribute-appeal copy and benefit-appeal copy

serve to reinforce Burger King’s value proposition that their meals are
affordable. For Samsung, their benefits and attributes also serve a common
goal: to provide as much tailored product information to their target-
shopper as possible.

So while there is value in differentiating between product attributes and

benefits, in most cases attributes and benefits go hand-in-hand - which
we’ll see examples of later on.

Hernandez, Wright, and Rodriguez thus define product attributes and

benefits in line with Gutman’s means-end chain concept.

Why is all this important, you ask?

What’s the importance of product attributes and

benefits?

Product attributes of a simple t-shirt. So what’s special about it? That’s

where your product benefits come in.
I could list many reasons for the importance of product attributes and
benefits when it comes to understanding consumer choice, preference, and
behavior.

But to give you a better overview, I’ve grouped their importance into two
categories:

1. Psychological
2. Technical

By psychological I mean understanding consumer psychology. Product

attributes and benefits are important because they optimize your customer-
centric approach by using theory and research.

And by technical I mean all the ins and outs of your eCommerce offering that
product attributes and benefits will help you optimize.

Let’s take a closer look.

1. Psychological importance of product attributes and

benefits

Product attributes help you understand your customers’ personal

values

Gutman’s means-end chain (1982) is a way to understand why consumers

choose the products they do for better product positioning. The means-end
chain model starts with the physical nature of the product (attributes) and
then works its way up to understand what the product delivers to the
consumer (benefits).

The last phase of the chain asks: What does the product help the
consumer achieve (values)?
Gutman’s means-end chain from “linking values to products” study by
Raffaele and Simona, 2002.

It basically suggests that every purchase is a means to an end.

For example, say I want to buy sunglasses. I choose the ones with polarized
lenses, which is a product attribute.
Polarized lenses for the beach, safari, skiing, or lounging on my terrace? So
what added value does the polarized lens bring to my life?

Why? Because I want to go skiing and the sun is more intense in the
mountains.

What’s the value of the polarized lenses in this context? I want to protect my
eyes which means,

a) I value my health,

b) I can afford quality attributes if they support this value.

This works for utilitarian products, too, since every choice or product
attribute (be it price, material, or even color) has a wider meaning behind it.

Understanding what product attributes resonate with your consumers and

why is important for a myriad of things like;

Customer segmentation (so you can group customers together based

on their choices and values).
Psychographic marketing (psychographics are all about understanding
your customers’ lifestyles, values, beliefs, and the means-end chain will
show how your products fulfill these psychographic variables so you
can optimize your marketing with value).
On-site personalization & targeting highlighting personal benefits
and how your products help the consumer achieve these.
Product positioning and product personalization (check out this
post for more about personalizing your products!).

In this context, product attributes and benefits are important to

understanding your customers by linking behavior to psychology.

Product attributes and benefits facilitate decision-making

Everlane’s Facebook ad for “The Rain Boot” which shows carefully curated
product attributes in line with their comfort/ease campaign.

Next to this, showing the attributes and benefits of your products (as
product badges or in your product descriptions, for instance) are nudges
that do three important things:

Personalize your products and overall webshop experience

Streamline the customer journey by nudging people through to
checkout
Give persuasive reasons for buying the product turning browsers into
buyers

Hold on a second - what are nudges again?

Nudges (which we’ve written extensively about - so I'm glad you asked), are
subtle changes to the choice architecture. For eCommerce, this choice
architecture is basically how you choose to present your products on-site -
download our free ebook at the end of this article for more!

Nudges aim to provide as much information to the customer without

inflicting choice overload.
Presented in the right way at the right time and product attributes and
benefits will be nudges that help your shoppers make better decisions,
optimizing the overall customer journey on your webshop!

2. Technical importance of product attributes and benefits

Product taxonomy

67% of American shoppers want to know everything that goes into their
food. 46% are swayed by labels like “organic” or “non-GMO”.

Lush have these labels on their webshop footer to give their customers
reasons to shop with their brand.

Having a deeper understanding of which product attributes appeal to

your target audience as benefits will help you sway your customers to
make informed decisions as they shop. This is important psychologically, but
also for product taxonomy.
IKEA’s product taxonomy relies on product attributes to guide the shopper’s
attention.

Your product attributes will help you organize your products in a way that
makes the most sense to your customers.

Search bar optimization and SEO

Google suggestions will show popular keywords you can use to optimize
your product taxonomy.

Alongside product taxonomy, product attributes and benefits are important

to help with search bar optimization.
In other words:

What terms are people typing into the search bar?

Which keywords are you ranking for?
What product messages increase click behavior?

Wayfair’s product taxonomy can be filtered by material: note how ceramic,

porcelain, and stoneware are top materials after doing keyword research and
optimizing accordingly (see previous image).

Product attributes and benefits are keywords your customers are using to
interact with your brand. Once you understand which keywords rank the
highest, you can optimize your entire eCommerce organization and
communication.

How do you find the benefits of your attributes?

Now that we know why this stuff is important, let’s take a small step back.
We’ve already talked about how product attributes and benefits are
interlinked.

But as a marketer you want to find the benefits from your product
attributes.

How do you do this?

Let’s go back to our good friend Gutman. The means-end chain analyzes
behavior in line with values. This means that first, you have to ask your
customers why they choose or like the products they do using focus
groups, interviews, or surveys in order to link behavior (attribute choices)
to value (benefit choices).

More ways to get customer feedback include:

Social listening
Market research
Polls
Analyzing on-site activity
Reviews

And a whole lot more...

Greats

Take a look at Greats’ review and rating box:

Source: Yotpo

The questions are directed to how the sneakers’ attributes (size, comfort,
color) benefit the shopper. Using the survey answers Greats can automate a
customer review shown on their “product review” page.

So how do you find the benefits of your attributes? You enter into a
dialogue with your customers. This is customer-centric retailing 101.

Ray-Ban

Next to this, you have to dissect and analyze your products. If you’re
selling a pair of sunglasses, its attributes are its colors, size, fit, frame, and
any special characteristics like polarized lenses that differentiate it from
others:

On Ray-Ban’s PDP, they have the details of the sunglasses which are the
product’s features. Even the name of the product is its special attribute.

After all, you want to push your products as unique in the market, and this
starts with identifying and presenting the sunglasses’ disruptive qualities.

So how does Ray-Ban identify what attributes are benefits?

Different from Greats, Ray-Ban takes a product-centric approach. Since they
promote their products as unique (the tagline “Never Hide” has dominated
their ads since 2007) the benefits of their product attributes are founded in
“more than 70 years of innovation and research”.

They take a scientific approach to analyzing benefits in terms of what

sets their product apart from other sunglasses brands, in line with their
unique brand positioning.

In this Never Hide Ad, Ray-Ban links the “transparent” attribute of their
Wayfarers, with being transparent as a person Gutman would be proud .

Brands who have an expensive price-point (e.g., luxury, electronics, jewelry)

will have a similar product promotion strategy. Premium brands should justify
their product quality.

Top Shop

Top Shop, on the other hand, optimizes their product taxonomy by

“category” (attributes) and “collection”, the latter which are product benefits
like “Going Out Shoes” and “Vegan Shoes”.

Sometimes, finding product benefits change by season. In order to truly

understand what attributes are seen as benefits, therefore, you should be
tracking trends.

Top Shop has collections that match their target audience’s desires and
group similar product attributes together by their overarching benefits.

For example, flats and heels are great going out shoes in the summer, but in
the winter you’d rather go out in boots or ankle boots, right?

The bottom line?

There are a plethora of examples of retailers finding benefits from attributes
and presenting them accordingly. But these three examples sum it up quite
nicely.

In order to find the benefits of your product attributes:

1. Deconstruct your brand USP and what features of your products you
should push to your target audience.
2. Analyze your target audience by having conversations, tracking their
behavior, leveraging interviews, surveys, and any other creative ways to
get the ball rolling.
3. Track seasons and trends and modify how your users interact with
your product attributes depending on these to tweak what you decide
to present as a benefit.

In the end, what you’ll achieve by bringing these strategies together are
product-driven customer experiences both on-site and off.

How to bring product-centricity (attributes)

together with customer-centricity (benefits)
This is how you bring the worlds of product-centricity (attributes) together
with customer-centricity (benefits).

It’s about using Gutman’s means-end-chain to discover the why behind the
buy for different customer segments. Once you acknowledge how most
products are bought with a personal value in mind, then you can really
get to the core of who is buying your products in the first place.

This brings product attributes together with product benefits. Let’s take a
look at some examples.

Product descriptions showing how attributes link to

benefits
Amazon

Amazon, perhaps the most dominant eCommerce store at the moment, has
product descriptions that highlight both product attributes and benefits:

Each product attribute is followed by a product benefit: compact and

lightweight (attribute), perfect for travel (benefit), etc.

Everlane

Moreover, Everlane - often praised for their great product descriptions - has
a similar approach:
Their shoe is a sneaker (attribute) designed for every destination (benefit).
The versatile leather (attribute) uses less waste (benefit). What you have is a
shoe tailored to a specific customer - the eco-friendly shopper.

The sneakers’ attributes are presented in a way that will benefit Everlane’s
target customer, whilst showing reasons for shopping with their brand over
others.

Product-driven customer experiences

Bringing the worlds of product-centricity and customer-centricity together
doesn’t stop at PDP optimization.

For example, you can test your attributes to learn which ones are the most
important to your customers.

With that, you can drive purchase behavior from the PLP to PDP.

One way of doing this is by leveraging Dynamic Badges on the PLP. You can
test which badges are most important at driving behavior.
Adidas

Let’s take the example of Adidas’ “Recycled Materials” badge. By testing this
message, and different attributes like, “Extra Warm”, “Waterproof”, and
“Durable” (for instance) Adidas could see which attributes their customers
are most interested in.
Let’s assume that they tested this and found that the attribute “recycled
material” is their highest-performing message for this product. Adidas can
promote this as a benefit in their omnichannel campaigns, re-targeting,
email marketing, or even in-store.

In the end, this could look something like Adidas’ twitter campaign that
highlights a product attribute (recycled material) to support a benefit (saving
the ocean and conscious consumerism):
So it's by understanding which product attributes are important to who that
you can begin to turn attributes into benefits.

Not only will you create more relevant, customer-centric campaigns, but you
can test how these messages differ with seasons, trends, etc.

With this, you can create entire campaigns showing how this attribute is
a benefit with value-driven copy!

Let’s break it down:

1. List the attributes associated with your products.

2. Test these attributes on-site to learn which of them drive the most
behavior (CTR, add-to-cart).
3. Use the best performing product attribute to optimize your omnichannel
benefit-messaging.

Bringing your product-centric and customer-centric approach together is

the future of retail marketing. It’s about testing different messages and
product features and then highlighting the features that resonate with
specific customer segments.

Remember statement C?
C. I sell and promote my products' features based on how they benefit the
lives of my customers.

When you look at the means-end chain model, this should be the crux of
bringing product-centric and customer-centric together.

You learn what attributes your customers love about your products in
order to foster a deeper understanding of those customers.

Let’s Wrap it Up!

You're probably aware by now that product attributes and benefits have long
been a source of academic research.

And product-centric vs. customer-centric approaches to marketing have

always separated attributes from benefits. What I hope this article has
shown you is that the two are actually interlinked.

For your product descriptions to provide the best kind of information, you
should be showing attributes and benefits in line with your brand tone of
voice.

For merchandising, test which product attributes and benefits drive

purchase behavior on-site in order to optimize your product messages,
taxonomy, and assortment.

And for your campaigns, finding which product attributes resonate as

benefits using a means-end-chain approach will help you understand your
customers on a deeper level.

Now it’s up to you!