The Difference Between Features and Benefits

Copywriting is often employed in order to help sell a product or service. Copywriting for marketing purposes usually entails describing a product thoroughly, highlighting perceived features and benefits in order to convince the target audience to buy your product. Believe it or not, however, many of us have a hard time understanding the basic difference between features and benefits. Both highlight the importance of a product and make it appear desirable. Contrary to popular perception, the two are not the same.

Features and benefits share a common purpose: describing the usefulness of a product. However, the similarity ends right there. A feature is a characteristic of the product, an aspect, or something it offers. It might not always be a benefit. A feature, of course, might result in a benefit. A feature is product centric: it is an attribute of the product entity.

A benefit, on the other hand, emanates from the customer. It is what affects the customer. A benefit is the way the product could provide an advantage to the customer, or make their life better. Sometimes a feature may provide a benefit to the customer. That’s when you can attempt to portray it as a core competence or a unique selling proposition.

Let’s take an example. Suppose you’re selling a car with Bluetooth connectivity as a feature. Yup, that’s a feature all right. But shouldn’t it belong in a PDA or mobile phone? What does a car have to do with Bluetooth connectivity? It would certainly be better if you could highlight the benefit of that particular feature. Like Bluetooth connectivity could enable you to listen to your mobile phone conversations through the car’s speakers, enabling you to talk effortlessly and not have to fiddle with your phone while driving. Hence, its a feature that translates to a real benefit: driving safety.

A good way to look at features and benefits is by way of a entity-relationship diagram. As is apparent, features come from the product, while benefits gravitate toward the customer or stakeholder. The two can also overlap in a USP.