A long time, when the Industrial Revolution was getting under way, just having some new invention was reason enough for people with enough cash in the bank to try it out.
“So you’ve invented a steam-powered horseless carriage, have you? I must try one of those out!” was probably something members of the landed gentry said back in the late 1800s.
Of course, some of them were dead against giving up their actual horses, as those had been a mainstay of the lives of lords and ladies of the manor for hundreds of years up till that point.
But a few of the younger, or crazier, members of the landed gentry with more money than sense were prepared to give it a try. And out of that, the automobile industry was born.
For the first couple of decades, automobiles were for the rich. They were hand-built from the ground up, and required the sort of skills that were hard to come by in the middle of the Industrial Revolution.
Then Henry Ford came along and invented mass production.
Now cars were affordable for just about everyone – including the people who worked in Henry Ford’s own factories. They were many more vehicles on the streets and, over the next few decades, automobiles became ubiquitous.
Now we’ve got more of them than we know what to do with, and many cities are clogged up pretty much 24/7 with motor vehicles of one sort or another.
What started out as a niche pastime for the idle rich became something that almost everyone owns.
The early years
In the early years, automobile manufacturers focused on refining their vehicles, and making them work better.
We went from steam-powered monstrosities through to the internal combustion engine fairly rapidly and, by the time the first Model Ts were rolling off Henry Ford’s assembly lines, the internal combustion-powered motor vehicle existed in pretty much the same format we use it today.
Sure, it wasn’t nearly as aerodynamic as a modern vehicle, nor could you plug in your phone to fire up Google Maps, but no adult today could look at a Model T Ford and be confused about whether or not it was a car…albeit a prehistoric one.
But the key thing is that a large part of the development of the automotive industry took place when there were less than 10,000 vehicles on the roads in the United States.
While there were, of course, engineering and technical challenges in the process, it’s a lot easier tinkering with one car at a time in a specialist workshop full of skilled mechanics than it is to try to fix Model T Fords when they’re coming off the assembly line at the rate of one every couple of minutes.
You just can’t fix things fast enough to put right a fundamentally broken production line process at the end of the process, just before despatch to your customers. You have to fix everything before you crank up the production line, not after.
But once you’ve got a template that works, you can roll out thousands of near-identical models of a Ford Model T without too much difficulty.
Smart people know you fix the system first, then crank up the volume. Not the other way round.
Features first, benefits second
Another feature of the early years of the automotive sector was that, in the beginning, just having a “horseless carriage” to sell was exciting enough – even if it wasn’t terribly practical and broke down a lot.
There was an infinitesimally small number of incredibly wealthy people who could afford one and they acquired significant personal pleasure and, I’m sure, status amongst their peers, just by owning a horseless carriage.
Even if it required coal to be shovelled into a boiler on a regular basis, and had a top speed of only 4mph.
The point here wasn’t that it was a more practical proposition than a horse. Because, in the early days, it wasn’t.
Rather, the attraction was that horseless carriages were new and novel. The sort of things only rich, sophisticated people who fancied themselves at the cutting edge of science and technology would consider buying.
When hand-built motor vehicles cost 5x an average annual salary, only the super-wealthy could afford one.
So, in the early days, just putting a sign outside your workshop saying “Horseless Carriages For Sale” would bring in the customers.
99.999% of the people passing your workshop knew they couldn’t afford one.
And the tiny number of very wealthy people in your neck of the woods would go to the only place around where horseless carriages were sold, if they wanted to buy one.
So selling wasn’t all that hard.
And, at a time when the motor vehicle industry was predominantly comprised of locally-based artisan workshops, realistically very few people were going to make the trip from, say, Los Angeles to Cincinnati to check out the new model of motor vehicle being built up there. Not least because there the car that could get you there hadn’t been invented yet, and the interstate highway network hadn’t been built.
So, in those days, cars were sold mostly on their features. “Look! We have a car for sale. And it’s got a front windscreen and a spare wheel.” (Or a roof for the passengers. Or a handbrake. Or something else that sounded cool in the early years of the 20th century.)
All of those were novelties to a group of people who had previously ridden horses everywhere, because there was no other way to get around.
When the novelty value is high, and you’re appealing only to a tiny group of very wealthy people, this features-led approach will work perfectly well.
It’s largely how luxury goods are still sold today.
Hermes scarves, Louis Vuitton handbags, and Dolce and Gabbana dresses are sold on their features (high-grade silk from artisan Cambodian silk worm farms located high in the mountains to ensure the very smoothest weave, for example – which I’ve totally made up, by the way).
And possessing one of those scarves, handbags, or dresses is enough to cement your status as one of the cognoscenti.
You can imagine Patsy and Eddie gushing about the mountain-top Cambodian silkworm farms on Absolutely Fabulous.
All they want is something to gush about that sets them apart from the hoi-polloi.
After that, they’re not too bothered.
And the product doesn’t even need to be particularly functional. I’ve no idea what the insulating qualities of a Hermes scarf are, because I’ve never owned one.
But I do know that the people who buy a Hermes scarf are not buying them because they’re planning to climb Everest and they’ve heard what great insulation your neck gets from a Hermes scarf.
People buy Hermes scarves because they are Hermes scarves and very few people can afford one – the Cambodian silk farm story, or whatever they say about their products, is mostly incidental but it helps to sell luxury goods, so who am I to complain?
Going mass market
For as long as your target market is rich people with time on their hands and money in the bank, you can get away with doing very little actual selling. The features alone are usually enough.
People come to you.
And, on the flimsiest of precepts – which may, or may not, include stories about mountain-top silk farms – they’ll give you $1000s to buy a product not that different in a functional sense from something you can buy for $10 at a mass-market outlet.
When you go mass market, however, features alone aren’t enough to sell.
You need to major on the benefits. Both benefits compared to other people who sell similar products or services to the ones you sell. And, ideally, benefits compared to doing nothing at all.
Nowadays, this is not usually done too overtly, although back in the early days of mail order retail, for example, the benefits were usually rammed down your throat whether you wanted them or not.
Let’s take toothpaste as our example.
In my local supermarket there is regular toothpaste. Extra-whitening toothpaste. Gum health toothpaste. Fresh breath toothpaste. Stain removal toothpaste. Toothpaste where the effects last more than 24 hours. Toothpaste 8 out of 10 dentists recommend. And dozens of other claims of one sort or another.
Now, I suspect 95% or more of any toothpaste is much the same as any other toothpaste, but there might be small percentages of active ingredients which are different between, for example, tooth-whitening brands and gum health brands.
My point here is that, for a mass market product, you have to sell the benefits, because finding toothpaste on a supermarket shelf is not difficult. My local supermarket has probably 20 brands or more vying for each shopper’s attention.
But depending on which solution I wanted – better gum health or whiter teeth, say – I now have only two or three possible options and I’ll pick one based on whether I want the cheapest, the most long-lasting effects, the freshest breath or whatever other criteria I might consider important.
Where it goes wrong
Where things often go wrong is when a mass market product (or one with aspirations to become a mass market product) is sold on features, not benefits.
Not many people would wander down the aisle of my local Sainsbury’s and respond positively to a big sign saying “Look! A tube of toothpaste!”
We all know what a toothpaste is and what it does, at least conceptually. What we need is information about why we should by Brand A or Brand B based on what criteria we have for selecting a toothpaste, be it gum health or whiter teeth.
Trying to sell a mass-market product, which requires strong benefits, as if it was a luxury good, when you can just witter on for a while about features like mountain-top silkworm farms for a while, is generally a mistake.
A great place to see that at the moment is the pitches for AI products.
I mean, it’s great that you can use AI turn an old photo of the cat you had as a teenager into an animated video of Snuggles walking around your back garden today. I’m sure that’s an impressive piece of technical work, much like inventing the internal combustion engine or pneumatic tyres was for the motor industry.
And if you’re selling to exclusively wealthy people with time on their hands and plenty of cash, knock yourself out. That’s probably enough. All they want is the exclusivity of being able to do something the hoi-polloi can’t do.
When you’re trying to sell a product to the entire planet, though, that doesn’t work any more.
Firstly, not that many people would want to create a video of a dead cat anyway. And very few of those who do are going to spend $1000s to see Snuggles walk around their garden again.
So, if you want your mass-market product to be commercially successful, you need some benefits.
And frankly, however interesting and clever the underlying technology is, there are virtually no benefits to reanimating Snuggles to the vast majority of the population.
All things being equal, therefore, they won’t.
Sure, people might mess around with it for a while, for fun, if it’s free or very cheap.
But the modern consumer has more than enough things to waste their time on already. Beyond the initial endorphin boost of seeing Snuggles again for the first time, how many videos of their dead cat does any sane person want to make?
Not many.
So, without a meaningful benefit, people stop using your AI video service and move on to a different, more beneficial (to their way of thinking – not necessarily yours) way of wasting their time.
I saw a pitch for an “AI-powered” accounting system recently, which very excitedly told me all of its features. The thing the tech folk who developed it didn’t seem to have understood was that their whizzy new technology didn’t give me anything I couldn’t already get from my £20 per month Xero subscription.
There was no discernible benefit to me at all, with the exception of being able to boast that I was one of the cool kids using AI.
You could sell horseless carriages in the late 1800s like that, when your audience was a very niche market comprising exclusively extremely wealthy people, on novelty value alone.
You can’t sell an aspiring mass-market accounting product in 2025 with a feature (“Look! AI!”) which, in the use-case of every accountant in the land, delivers no significant tangible benefits beyond what we can already get from Xero for £20pm.
It got worse
When I gently pushed back against this less-than-compelling pitch, it got worse.
I was told that it would allow me to run 100s of reports which would help me “stay on top of my business”. Doh! What do they think Xero does now?
And also that it would allow me to manage risk better, even though none of the features they claimed to deliver would allow anyone to manage risk better, AI-powered or not.
This exchange just demonstrated how little the people selling this product knew about accounting software. Which, if I’m honest, did not increase the chances of me wanting to buy what they had to sell – if a software company doesn’t understand their own target market, and hadn’t done even a rudimentary competitor analysis, they don’t deserve to make any sales.
Outside accounting, this is also a characteristic many of the “It’s X…but with added AI!” pitches I see at the moment.
AI is generally delivering little or no tangible benefit over and above what existing software products are doing perfectly well already.
So AI companies are piling in more and more features in the hope that enough of the planet will go “hey, that’s cool” and shell out $000s a year to use that product or service.
But ultimately the AI companies are wasting their time. Particularly in business, where nobody is going to invest in anything without a cast-iron business case. (The B2C market is slightly different, albeit significantly less lucrative.)
And for a cast-iron business case you need benefits, not features. Yet, there are remarkably few of those around.
Which, I suspect, is why AI companies are struggling to generate a viable revenue stream.
The truth is that, beyond an initial “hey, that’s cool” reaction, like the cat videos, nobody cares.
And certainly nobody cares enough to shell out the enterprise-level $millions a year those businesses need to stay afloat when their seed capital runs out.
Frankly, I’m suspicious
This is all so obvious that I can only form one view of the AI industry.
And it’s this – even they are acknowledging, internally if not externally, that their products offer little or no real-world benefits.
And I can be pretty sure of that because if there were any benefits, they’d be shouting them from the rooftops by now and we’d all be handing over $000s a year for the privilege of using their services.
It’s such an obvious route to monetisation at a level beyond every venture capitalist’s dreams that the fact they’re not doing it can only mean there aren’t any real-world benefits to the technology at all. Which means, when the investor cash runs out, they don’t have a viable business.
Why would any sane person take the much harder route of finding hundreds of new and novel features in the hope that at least one of them captures the public’s imagination, if a really simple route akin to “buy this toothpaste for whiter teeth” was available without breaching all the “truth in advertising” legislation.
Actually, I’m being slightly unfair there. The only benefit AI companies talk about regularly is “we can do what you do now, just a bit cheaper”.
Frankly, that’s just about the laziest benefit there is.
And it’s a particularly stupid “benefit” because, however cheap Company A does something, I can guarantee there’s a Company B out there somewhere who can do it a little bit cheaper than Company A does.
Before you know where you are, everyone is playing off all those companies off against one another and they’re all supplying incremental customers at a price below their marginal cost of production.
I say that with confidence because that’s what happens in every sector which can only deliver a price-based benefit. The industry competes itself down to margins of pretty much zero…which isn’t the world’s most long-lasting strategy for running a successful business. Especially if you want a business worth $billions.
And that’s even assuming AI companies deliver tangible cost savings at all, which I haven’t seen yet.
There’s been a recent MIT report saying that 95% of AI implementations haven’t delivered the business benefits originally claimed, for example.
And IBM have reportedly had to hire back most of the people they let go on the basis that AI had made their jobs redundant, because AI could not, in fact, replace those human beings on a like-for-like basis. If a massive tech company could be hoodwinked like that by the false promises of AI technology, there’s probably no hope for the rest of us.
So, my working assumption – which I’m happy to revise in the face of evidence to the contrary – is that AI delivers no significant business benefits. If it did, we’d be hearing about them every day of the week and we’d all be happy to pay AI companies $000s a year just for the privilege of using their products.
Sell the benefits, not the features
If, fundamentally, your product doesn’t work, and you’re about as ethically-challenged as the average AI company, by all means sell the features of your product, because that’s probably all you’ve got.
It’s like structuring your entire sales process around a “Look! A Squirrel!” strategy.
But if you deliver a real-world benefit you’ll scale faster and become more profitable if you sell those benefits.
(Unless the “benefit” is “we do X, but cheaper” in which case you and your competition will drive your margins down to almost nothing because that’s what happens with commodity products.)
Selling the benefits is much easier because who wouldn’t want a tangible bottom-line boost to their business, provided they believe that the product you’re selling will do exactly that on a sustainable basis.
As you deliver more and more products, and more and more people appreciate the tangible benefits your business brings, word gets round and it becomes easier and easier to make the next sale…and the next…and the next…
If AI companies actually delivered real bottom line benefits, we’d be hearing all about it.
And we’re not.
Which is why I don’t think they deliver any real-world benefit at all.
But, when thinking about real-world benefits, you have to do something that tech folk are very poor at (in fairness, so are many engineers and accountants, in my experience) which is to look at what you think a benefit is through your customer’s eyes to make sure it isn’t just a feature really.
This requires you to realise that you don’t know everything about the world…and to accept that there is a real world outside your lab/workshop/finance department which might not conform to the neat and tidy rules you can implement inside the closed system that is your lab/workshop/finance department.
That’s where people – especially in tech and those other professions – go wrong.
They think just because they’ve come up with some cool idea that it’s automatically a benefit. But usually it isn’t. At best it’s a feature. Often, it’s an irrelevance.
For a business, being able to animate videos of dead cats, for example, is a feature, not a benefit. Or more likely an irrelevance, in a business setting.
So let’s look at a few real world examples to make a point – mostly non-tech based, just for balance, because other industries get this wrong too.
Some benefit examples (or not)
When you look at a problem through your customers’ eyes, you get a very different perspective from “look, I developed this cool thing in a lab”.
Here are three quick examples of something that might sound like a benefit to the people trying to shift products, but which, in fact, aren’t really benefits at all. If I was being kind, I’d say they were features. Some aren’t even that.
1-Cartonboard
Many years ago I worked in the printing industry. We made printed folding cartons (the brightly coloured boxes you see in the supermarket with breakfast cereal inside them, or tea bags, or a frozen dinner).
One of our suppliers wanted us to buy their super-duper carton board to make those products, which was well-engineered and super-smooth. It would, they claimed, allow us to run our presses faster and give us a better finished product with less wastage.
We tried it on a job alongside our standard carton board and the claims the manufacturer made were true. We could run our presses faster and we did have a better finished product with less wastage.
The problem was the price they wanted for their carton board meant that the best economic decision for our business was to run our presses a little slower and tolerate a slightly higher wastage in production.
The well-engineered, super-smooth product was a feature. It delivered no bottom line benefit to the business, so we never used it again.
2-Cars
The motor trade generates lots of examples of not taking a customer view of your selling messages.
For example, for some time I’ve been targeted by online ads telling me I should buy a new hybrid car because it delivers just over 50mpg.
That sounds like a benefit from the manufacturer’s perspective, I’m sure.
Except the car I have now does 41/42mpg. So they want me to spend £40-50k buying a new car “because it’s more fuel efficient” for about another 8 or 9pmg.
Factor in that, at the moment, I’m driving less than 3,000 miles a year and there is no economic benefit whatsoever to me spending £40-50k to get another 8 or 9mpg.
Part of me would like a swanky new car. But whatever else is going on here, that 50mpg car delivers no bottom line benefits to me.
Whereas the same pitch targeted at a high-mileage driver might well be seen as a good reason to spend upwards of £40k on a new car.
What might be a benefit to them isn’t a benefit to me. Not every customer is the same. Not every “benefit” is seen as a benefit to every customer.
The art of sales is knowing which is which.
3-Customer service
Many organisations parrot a line you’ll have heard before.
You find it on packaging sometimes, and also in the recorded message you get when you call a call centre, shortly after the recorded message saying, for the 8,000th day in a row, that the company is experiencing “unusually high call volumes” and “you might need to wait longer than usual to be served”.
Once they’ve softened you up with that, the next recorded message says something like: “for a faster service, please go to our website where we can serve you 24/7”.
While I would concede that my experience of most organisations’ call centres is variable (some are excellent, some are terrible), my experience of customer service delivered via a website is uniformly terrible.
First, we have the hunt for our customer number on the invoice that we don’t have any more, or we need to remember the email and password we used to log into the darned website originally, which can take some time.
Next, we get the dreaded automated chatbot which spends 10 minutes not understanding our problem, before directing us to the same FAQ pages we’d already checked out before calling the call centre.
Then we might get a human chat agent.
Finally, we might get to speak with a human.
And finally, finally, finally…if we’re really, really lucky…we might get our problem solved.
24/7 customer service sounds like a benefit, but it isn’t.
For two reasons.
Firstly, it’s invariably terrible.
Secondly this “benefit” has turned a 3 minute phone call into an hour-long extravaganza (a particular thanks to Norton anti-virus products here, who kindly gave me the inspiration for this article a couple of weeks ago).
From a customer point of view, making me spend 57 minutes more than I have to for the privilege of doing something simple is not…by even the most fevered stretch of imagination…a benefit to me.
It’s the exact opposite. It’s a perfect reason to shop somewhere else, quite frankly.
While 24/7 customer service sounds like a benefit, if it doesn’t actually solve your customer’s problem in a timely manner, it probably isn’t even a feature. It’s more like an irritation or a turn-off, if anything.
The moral of our tale
So, there are three morals to today’s tale.
Firstly, it is so much quicker and easier to sell when you focus on the benefits you offer, rather than the features of your product.
If you only sell the features, your market is limited to people who think the same as you on a topic – that videos of your dead cat brought back to life are cool, for example.
That’s likely to be 5% or less of the total potential market for your products, so this is a very short-sighted approach.
Secondly, don’t get confused between what a feature is and what a benefit is. Not everything you put into your product is a benefit to anyone, however cool you think it is.
Finally, a benefit is only a benefit if customers see it as such, otherwise it’s just a feature and isn’t going to help you make a sale – that £40k-plus car that was going to get me another 8mpg for example. Or 24/7 customer service that doesn’t actually serve any of your customers in a timely manner.
Fundamentally, if you’re not leading with a strong list of benefits, my working assumption is that there aren’t any benefits in buying from your business compared to buying from one of your competitors, so I’m likely to shop around and just buy the cheapest because you haven’t given me any good reasons to prefer your business over your competitors.
While there will always be some people why buy the most expensive product (the Hermes scarf) or buy something because it’s cool (animated videos of dead cats brought back to life) or buy on the back of some grifter’s sales spiel about changing the world (most AI products), if you have to depend on those techniques to make a sale, your business is not built on solid foundations.
So you might want to think again.
And if you can’t think of any genuine benefits from your customers’ perspective, you might want to think about doing something else before the cash runs out, because you don’t have a viable business.