Potential buyers don’t care about the features that your product possesses and how proud you are of them. What they do want to know what your product can do for them. Sounds simple, right? But why do brochures, company web pages and industry portals contain so little about product benefits?
Instead, they are littered with meaningless phrases like in
- Maximum versatility,
- State-of-the-art solution,
- Optimal quality,
- World-class precision,
- Cutting-edge technology, etc.
This sort of marketing drivel discourages rather than impresses buyers. In particular as there is a useful method for good product description writing: the FAB technique. This blog post will explain the principles behind the FAB method, which automatically lets you write better product descriptions.
What’s behind the FAB technique?
The FAB method is a three-step approach to describing a product in terms of features, advantages and benefits.
Definition of Feature
Features are product characteristics. For an irrigation pump, a flow rate of 10 m³/h would be one of its features.
Definition of Advantage
Advantages are the upsides that product features bring about. An advantage of an irrigation pump with a 10 m³/h flow rate could be that the user can use several lawn sprinklers simultaneously.
Definition of Benefit
A product benefit is a gain for the customer achieved by using the product. For our irrigation pump, the benefit of the high flow rate is that the customer is spared the tedious task of moving lawn sprinklers about if wanting to irrigate a wide area.
How to go about using the FAB method
Product descriptions created on the basis of the FAB technique let you stand out clearly from the crowd of your competitors because you are focusing on customer benefit. Product benefits are the answer to a potential buyer’s question “What exactly are the reasons why I should buy this product?”
- List all the features of your product that spring to mind. These can be technical properties, such as the flow rate or the number of wells in a microtiter plate. Write these properties into a table.
- For each feature, think of one to three advantages. Take enough time for this because you are doing the groundwork for your product description to ultimately increase your sales.
- Now comes the hardest bit for many copywriters: for each advantage, establish one or two benefits. Keep asking yourself the question: how will the buyer benefit from the advantage?
Tip: Through their regular contacts with customers, sales reps and service technicians usually know very well how the products are used. Ask your colleagues what customers see as the main benefits they get from using your product.
The FAB method: List of the features, advantages and benefits of a product
FAB | Features | Advantages | Benefits |
| 1 | Automated setup | Less training needed Consistently reproducible results | Knowing to have everything under control |
| 2 | Coherent, complete audit trail for loading, processing and reporting | Easier audit preparation | Knowing to be 100% prepared for the audit |
| 3 | UNIFI Software | Automated setup and calibration | Consistent results for users of all experience levels |
| 4 | All components are configured, tested and installed together | Quick to put into operation | Higher productivity in routine usage |
| 5 | SmartMS | Errors are easily identified and eliminated | High operational availability |
| 6 | Optimized system for stable and reproducible results with any application | Same quality of results all the time | Full confidence in your results |
The FAB technique
- helps you to systematically develop the line of argument from feature → advantage → benefit
- lays the groundwork for product descriptions that sell better,
- help you to gain more sales leads.
Conclusion
The FAB technique permits anyone to write better product descriptions. Its systematic approach helps you to discover the product benefits your customers get. In another blog post, you can find out how to analyse and improve existing texts using the FAB method.
How do you go about product description writing? What do you find to be the biggest obstacles to working out customer benefits? I look forward to your comments and suggestions.
