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Harvard Business School professor Theodore Leavitt emphasized the customer impact of benefits when he famously argued that people don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill; they want a quarter-inch hole.1 Although his idea is straightforward, many companies still fail to appreciate how embracing a benefits-driven approach can help them unlock new opportunities — for innovation, customer satisfaction, and sustainable growth.
Benefits are the desirable outcomes that customers receive from your brand. This definition holds true regardless of whether customers are in B2B or B2C spaces and whether the organization is a company, nonprofit, or sole proprietor offering a product, a service, or an experience. Benefits help customers reach their goals and reduce their pains.
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Focusing on the benefits customers genuinely want offers a straightforward path for companies to design, market, and deliver their products and services, and to grow strategically in ways that resonate deeply with their target customers. For marketing executives, this path is also highly actionable: A focus on customer benefits lets a company examine its entire set of strategic decisions (market segmentation, target segment selection, positioning, company analysis, competitor analysis, implementation decisions, and growth opportunities) through the lens of benefits.
Why Marketers Must Put Customer Benefits First
As we note in our book, The Brand Benefits Playbook, some marketing leaders don’t tap into the power of a benefits-first perspective because they don’t understand the value of applying it in an integrated way.2 Here are seven compelling reasons why customer benefits should be a central concern of your company.
1. To avoid marketing myopia. Marketing myopia happens when organizations focus on a product, industry, vertical, or demographic instead of the benefits that customers want. For example, Coca-Cola wisely says its purpose is to “refresh the world.” By saying that it’s in the refreshment business (a benefits focus) rather than the soda business (a product focus), it opens a broader view of the potential market and the competitors in that market.
Here’s another example. The online search industry (for example, Google) emphasizes the search, which is an activity. Why do you search? To get the benefit of access to information. As we’ll discuss in a minute, ChatGPT provides exactly that benefit. If search companies don’t focus on the threat from new GenAI rivals that provide the same benefit, they could get hurt.
References
1. T. Levitt, “Marketing Myopia,” Harvard Business Review 38, no. 4 (July-August 1960): 45-56.
2. A. Weiss and D.J. MacInnis, “The Brand Benefits Playbook: Why Customers Aren’t Buying What You’re Selling — and What to Do About It” (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2024).
3. M.E. Porter, “Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance” (New York: Free Press, 1985).
4. C.W. Park, D.J. MacInnis, and A.B. Eisingerich, “Brand Admiration: Building a Business People Love” (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2016).
5. C.K. Prahalad and G. Hamel, “The Core Competence of the Corporation,” Harvard Business Review 68, no. 3 (May-June 1990): 79-91.
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