Remember Features and Benefits? Sure; that’s Sales 101, right? Features describe a product or service, Benefits describe what that product or service does for the customer. These are pretty basic concepts, but sometimes a small business marketer needs to borrow these time-tested sales techniques to help build a Brand Banner or to dredge up a clever marketing promotion or ad campaign.

Stickiness is an idea described by Gladwell in The Tipping Point. For our marketing purposes, stickiness is how well your marketing message is remembered by--sticks with--your customers and prospects. Stickiness can be achieved by a catchy phrase or a clever marketing gimmick or some type of giveaway or a clever slogan. The idea is to get customers to remember your business; to make it stick with them inside their mind.

The following is a simple exercise designed to help you with building your next promotion or clarifying your brand. Set aside, say, fifteen minutes and just look at your company’s strengths. For now, please forget about your company compared to the competition. This isn’t a discovery exercise in figuring out where your company is positioned in the market. To start with, simply list features and benefits of your primary products or services. Remember, a feature is a function, the “what it does” of a product or service. A benefit is a “what is does for the customer”. There is a world of difference between the two. We suggest you build a simple table on your computer, or you can even rough it out on a piece of notebook paper. Construct four columns, with the following column headings:

* Feature
* Benefit
* One or two Words that Sum Up Benefit
* How to make it Sticky

Underneath the four columns, list ten or twenty rows. It’s best to write down loads of features and benefits, even ones that you think trivial, and then eliminate ones that aren’t relevant to your marketing efforts. So the first two columns may have twenty rows, while the last two might look half full. You might be able to combine certain features and benefits with the same marketing message or device. Your time will be well spent if you conjure up even a couple decent marketing ideas that help to effectively communicate your company’s Brand to your customers.

For example, if ample parking is a plus at your shop, then list “plenty of free parking” as a feature. The benefits would include “no money spent on meters; no wasted time looking for a parking space; customers don’t have to walk far to our store”. A couple words that sum up your parking might be “free, close-by parking”.

Making this benefit memorable is a different trick. What if you ran a week-long promotion where you gave a dime to each customer who shopped at your store? The reason—the next time they are shopping where there’s a meter they’ll have a dime, courtesy of Your Store, the home of “always free, always close parking”. The idea here isn’t to come up with a dozen promotions. Rather, it’s to flesh out the little things that can set you apart from the competition. This is the type of exercise you can spend a few days on, thirty minutes at a time, here and there. It’s hard to pull everything up and out of your brain in one quick setting; better to let ideas percolate around inside for a while.