Blog > How FAB are You?
I suspect you and your business are pretty fab, but here are some pointers to help you make your business even more fab!
There are many facets of creating a strong brand which in turns helps you to deliver strong sales. My favourite part is the FAB part. As you may know, in branding terms FAB stands for Features and Benefits.
Thinking through what your Features And Benefits are can often help your small business and brand take a big leap forward.
So, let’s look at each in turn:
Features: This is about clearly identifying the functionality of a product or service – what exactly does it do or deliver for your customers? For example in choosing a toothpaste for your family you would want something that you know will clean teeth well and prevent decay. In choosing toothpaste for yourself you might want something that whitens teeth or protects gums.
Benefits: This is about the emotional benefits of your product or service – and these are the real secret to increasing your sales. For example, the emotional benefit of buying a good brand of family toothpaste would be that you feel like a good mother in helping to protect your children’s teeth. The emotional benefit of a whitening toothpaste for you would be greater confidence through a bright smile.
If we look at my own business as another example, where I work with entrepreneurs, a functional benefit for my clients is that they create a strong brand to take their business forward. Whilst an emotional benefit would be that they feel more energised about their business, and have increased confidence and positivity.
People buy on emotion – This is a really important point to remember and I do spend quite a bit of time with some of my clients helping them make that switch to thinking of both the emotional and functional benefits of their products / services and not just the functional. It is really important if you want to differentiate your brand and build your business to be very clear on both your Functional and Emotional benefits.
So, take a bit of time right now – to jot down your top 5 Functional and Emotional benefits. Really dig deep to think about all the benefits that you bring to people.
Research and On-going Thoughts: Keep in mind FAB all the time, when a client thanks you and says how your product or service has helped them ensure you note down any extra FABs they may have mentioned – you might be delivering an emotional benefit you didn’t know about! Also, take time to conduct some research with existing or old clients to find out their perspective about the benefits you have delivered to them.
Reasons to Believe: Lastly, another element of building a brand that goes very well with your Features and Benefits are your Reasons to Believe. Customers like to have confidence that what they are buying will deliver the benefits it claims; you need to give them the confidence (a key emotion when deciding to buy!) that they are making a good decision.
So if we go back to our toothpaste example, reasons to believe could be that it is a world-wide brand with a certain percentage of the market, it has a particular active ingredient, it is endorsed by a dental association, or it performs well in clinical trials etc. For my clients reasons to believe include previous client testimonials and results, my coach and business psychology qualifications and my years of consultancy work. I hope you get the idea of how to marry your FABs with Reasons to believe?
I hope you have found this blog useful and that it helps you to become even more FAB than you are already!