“Welcome to the Proven, Practical, Profitable Innovation podcast! I am Richard and I thank you very much for taking time out of your busy day to listen to this podcast. My goal is to make sure you get a high return on your time investment listening to this podcast. I want you to immediately be able to use the information in this podcast to help you sell more and make more. When you find that this podcast helps you, I would greatly appreciate it if you could give me a five-star rating and a written review. It helps us to become visible to more and more people who can benefit from the help in this podcast. Thank you in advance for your help with getting five-star ratings.
As I shared with you in the first podcast of this series, 75% of all new products fail, with most of them failing in the first 12 – 24 months. Many fail because the quality of their communication to potential customers does not clearly and persuasively communicate the product’s best possible story. So if you have an innovative new product or are bringing innovation to an existing product, this series of podcasts provide you with the proven science of persuasion powered by Merwyn technology. Use this with skill and you will not have to worry if you have done the best job of communicating to potential customers.
In the previous podcast identified the three critical elements of the science of persuasion powered by Merwyn technology. Those elements are communicating a customer benefit, giving them a reason to believe you can deliver the benefit, and letting them know how your product is better than other options they have. Today’s podcast does a deep dive into creating highly persuasive benefit communication. In this series learn how to double the chances for success for an existing or new product – proven by rock solid science known as the Science of Persuasion powered by Merwyn Technology.
If after listening to this podcast you feel a need for more help, please contact me directly—my email is richard@i2ge.com. You can also go to my website—i2ge.com– where you can explore many innovation topics, especially check out the DIY Innovation Training on the menu bar. We customize all the training programs to our clients’ unique needs and circumstances.
Benefit communication – overview.
Merwyn Technology is used to evaluate actual product communication. When it comes to persuasively communicating and products benefit, we know scientifically that the strength of your benefit communication directly impacts your chances of success. Specifically products with weak benefit communication have a 13% chance of succeeding. If you have strong benefit communication you double your chances to 26%. And best of all, if you have very strong benefit communication your chances for success increase to 38%.
So with very strong benefit communication alone, you can have chances for success that are higher than the average 25% success rate for all products. And if you increase the persuasiveness of you benefit communication from weak to strong you double your chances for success. In subsequent podcasts we will show how when you add a credible reason to believe and communication of your differences that your chances go up dramatically.
Benefit communication 101: five important points
First, you must start by understanding customer needs and wants for your product.
You cannot assume unless you willing to take on a high level of risk that you know clearly and specifically what the customer needs and wants are for your product.
You need to make sure that you understand their language in describing their needs and wants. When you communicate benefits to them you need to talk to them in the language they use when thinking about are talking about products like yours.
Here’s an example from my time as vice president of marketing at the Gallo Winery. If we were going to talk to consumers about the taste of a Riesling wine, we had several options. We could describe it is sweet, fruity, and smooth. We knew from talking to Riesling wine drinkers that fruity was a positive term while sweet was not so positive to negative. Having said that, we knew that the fruity taste came from the sweetness of the line. Bottom line, we talked to consumers in the language they used in the language that was most positive to them.
Second, you want to communicate benefits, not features. Features describe something about the product like what it’s made of and technology that is in a device. It doesn’t tell you how this helps you by meeting your need. Of the share if you examples.
The advanced stabilization control example – reduces rollover risk by 25%.
This drill bit is made of titanium – feature. This drill bit stay sharp twice as long – the benefit.
Our company invented quad logic which took seven years and $22 million to develop.
Quad logic software reduces your customer service costs 20 – 30% within 30 days of installation.
Third, make your benefit specific.
Fast shoeshine or two-minute shoeshine.
Reliable service or over 99% on time customer shipments.
High-quality service or no customer complaints in the last two years.
Fourth, communicating fewer benefits can be more persuasive than more benefits.
Products communicating one – two benefits had a higher rate of success than products generating 3+ benefits.
Be good and known for one thing.
BMW – the ultimate driving machine.
Volvo – – safety.
Bounty – the quicker picker upper.
Fifth, communicate the most important benefits your customers want – emotional or rational benefits are equally effective if they are the right benefits for your customers.
Some good benefit examples.
Reduces order processing times from two days to 30 minutes. And within 18 months they expect a 100% return on their investment.
Perfect 10 – perfect nails for 10 days (Revlon nail polish).
Now you can shave your legs half as often.
The upcoming podcasts.
Reason to believe: once we know what our benefit promises, we need to craft a reason to believe that potential customers find highly credible. You will discover the five different strategies available to us in creating a highly persuasive reason to believe.
Dramatic difference: the most powerful part of the science of persuasion is communicating our benefit promise is better – hopefully dramatically better – then some, most, or all of the competitive options. You will learn how to communicate these differences with skill and persuasiveness.
The series will conclude by a podcast that pulls together the three elements and shows how they work best together.
Ongoing close.
With what you have learned today, the vast majority of you can immediately increase the persuasiveness of what you are communicating to customers by having very strong benefit communication. This is true for any new products you might invent and for existing products.
If you would like to see the key written points from this podcast, you can find them in my blog – i2ge.com/blog.
One of my six books is Proven Practical Innovation That Delivers Results. This very low-cost book is available at Amazon in paperback and has a Kindle book. Is truly packed with lots of practical help.
After the completion of this series, we move into a series you will not want to miss. We will have a series of interviews with the person who is probably invented more new products than anyone in America. If there was an innovation Hall of Fame, she would be in it.
Thank you very much for your time and I look forward to reconnecting with you soon.
