This blog post will make you smarter, faster and more attractive

‘Talk about benefits, not features.’ It’s one of the golden rules of copywriting. Because people don’t care about the details, they care about what your product/service/widget can do for them.

So, if you’re selling broadband, don’t bang on about ‘20 meg download speeds’, just explain that ‘you’ll be able to watch Netflix without any buffering problems’.

Right?

It’s fine as a rule of thumb, but it ignores the fact that actually, most benefits, no matter what you’re talking about, are pretty much the same: this product/service/widget will make you smarter/save you time/make you more attractive/give you more enjoyment. That pretty much covers it, doesn’t it?

The most interesting writing tends to sit in the blurry bit between features and benefits – when the features imply the benefits. Here’s an example.

There’s a café near where I live that serves the ‘three-mile breakfast’. It’s called the three-mile breakfast because all the ingredients used in it are sourced within a three-mile radius of the café.

Technically, it’s a ‘feature’ – it just tells you a fact about the breakfast. But it’s a feature that implies a whole host of benefits.

* Your fry-up is likely to be fresher and tastier because the ingredients haven’t had to travel so far.

* You can eat with a clear eco-conscience because the food miles are low (and the ingredients are likely to be organic).

* Eating here might well be fun/cool/interesting because the people who work here haven’t just gone for the standard ‘full English breakfast’.

The quirky ‘three-mile’ detail is a feature that works much harder than any generic benefit ever could.

I suppose ‘talk about benefits, not features, except when your reader will understand the benefit implicitly and the feature is more interesting’ isn’t such a snappy rule of thumb, though.