Communicating and Educating Customers
Marketing has two main objectives. The first is to educate and second, to communicate your product to your customers. F.A.B. is a commonly used method to promote or market a product. The acronym F refers to Features or what the product has, A for Advantages or what the product can do for the customer and B is for Benefits or what’s in it for the customer. Here’s a great marketing example:
When iPod was introduced back in 2001, technically, it was just like any other portable music player in the market. Apart from its enhanced technology, sleek design and user-friendly controls, the iPod’s huge success is largely attributed to Steve Jobs’ marketing ingenuity. Thanks to his fresh, creative and innovative way of marketing, the iPod’s sales soared beyond imagination.
During the iPod’s product launching conference, Jobs had set the tone with distinctive product positioning, clearly differentiating iPod from its competitors. He centred his focus on iPod’s huge storage space of 5 Gigabytes [5GB], which was revolutionary back in 2001 (when the average flash-drive storage was only 1 Megabyte [1MB]). Instead of focusing on the technical aspect of its 5GB feature, Jobs captured everyone’s attention by emphasising on the lifestyle benefits of having such a large storage space. “What can you do with 5GB storage? Well, you can now forget all the CDs you need to carry along while you are traveling, because this small little device can store up to 1000 songs and it fits just nicely in your pocket”, Jobs said in his presentation.
“1000 songs in your pocket” became the tagline for the iPod. Jobs had presented a benefit, which is simple, easy to understand, and appeared as something tangible to Apple’s target audience. Today, the iPod, together with iTunes, have changed the way people listen to music and revolutionised the music industry forever.
