Page 23 - Intercom On Marketing

To start with, you need to have a clear understanding of who your target customer is. From there, you need to understand what problems you can solve
for them. These have to be real problems they are looking for solutions to, and you need to be able to clearly articulate a world in which using your product or service solves those problems for them, in a way better than anyone else has.
For example, around the time Apple launched the iPod, MP3 players were a dime a dozen. The problem was marketing. Everyone else was saying “1GB storage on your MP3 player” – falling into the feature based marketing trap we discussed above – but nobody was talking about how their product would make customers’ lives better.
Apple went ahead and focused on the customer benefit: 1,000 songs in your pocket. By deliberately avoiding talking about the tech (the storage capacity), they enabled people to avoid having to figure out what 1GB actually meant for them. At a time when MP3 players were competing with CD players and 1,000 songs on a device was a novelty, customers could clearly see the advantage the iPod would bring.
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