Product Focused Appeal

Most people will not make their decisions about what jeans to buy on the basis of the quality of materials, number and engineering of rivets, or color fading characteristics - they'll go for a label. Does this mean that when buying a PC they say - well, so long as it's a Big Blue I don't need to know any more!? Of course not. When buying a PC, apart from being a bit leery of unheard of clones, what they really want to know how much hard disk space, how much RAM, what speed modem, what size screen, what bundled software, what chip, and they will have a range of other questions along these lines. The brand is not such a big deal - except for Mac fanatics - so long as the buyer feels confident that it's sufficiently well established to provide a reasonable degree of guarantee, customer care etc. Sure you'll have people who swear by IBM or Dell or Gateway or whatever has worked well for them, but it will be very difficult to get anyone to buy Brand X at the same price as Brand Y if Brand Y has better product features.

Here's an ad that would probably never sell a PC: "Buy the Thinkpad -- because it's an IBM"

And IBM would probably never put out an ad like that, but Gucci would - and would say even less - in fact they would say nothing at all (see Brand Focused Appeal).

So PC ads often look like this...
The Brand X PC features:

* An 800MZH Processor
* 20 GB Hard Drive
* 16xDVD Player
* 8MG Graphics Card
* 56K Modem
* 17 inch Monitor
* 80W Stereo Sound Speaker System
* MS Windows 2000
* Plus $500 worth of software!!

Confusion can set in because of the strenuous efforts of manufacturers to try to create a perceived advantage attaching to their brand through advertising and publicity. And of course this works to a certain extent and is a perfectly valid marketing strategy. The fundamental point, however, is that if the value that your customer receives from your product/service is primarily functional (as is the case with much machinery, software, coal for burning, family photograph albums and a myriad of common purchases), then the content of your marketing communications must focus on that functionality. If you can find ways to add some brand or other psychological values to increase the appeal and beat off the competition that's fine, but remember the central focus - if they buy it for what it does or what it is, tell them what it does or what it is!