Clearly articulated value

For most consumer products, this is the name of the game. It’s a fine balance of needs, wants & emotion vs cost. Get that balance right and you’ve got a sale.

Emotional vs Rational Benefits

Think back to any exchange, any time you handed over your hard earned cash for something. Those factors are weighed up near instantly. If your customers don’t need the thing, then the first place to drive action is emotion. There’s no way I’m picking something up that I didn’t already need without that emotional pull.

“Oh damn it’s got a penguin on the front”
“That’s gonna look classy as hell on the side in the kitchen”
“Finally, I feel seen in the pasta aisle”

Once we’ve been pulled in by the bright colours and illustrations with our dumb brains, we move to a rational place to justify action. Rational benefits are broad, sometimes category specific and often misunderstood.

Usually what you find is, that the team behind a product, know that product & category so well that they over-communicate the rational side of things on PHD levels.

I don’t know all the B vitamins by name. I didn’t know my dog needed that. I’ve never heard the latin for L-Theanine.

It’s natural though, I get it.

In the early days of building the design studio, I overwhelmed countless clients with very detailed design explanations. You know what they didn’t need? That. You know what they did need? To understand how what I offered solved their business problems, in their language.

That’s not to say customers are idiots, it’s just that we have to filter information based on the customer, space and attention span available.

Think about buying a car – the really deep cut rational benefits are mainly for car nerds. I don’t really give a shit how many horses this thing can outrun, I rarely race horses anymore (severe allergy). I just need to know that my receding hairline is gonna blow in the wind when I’m driving 85 blasting Free Bird.

If it’s a midlife crisis that brought me here, sell me my youth babyyyyy.