Wade Armstrong

• Latest
• Archives
• Links
• About Me
• Projects
• Contact Me

Features, Benefits, and Selling the CIA

Posted Tuesday October 3, 2006 in Business

Recently, while watching late-night television shows targeted at the late-20s/early-30s demographic of which I am a member, I was surprised to see an ad encouraging me to apply for a job as a spy. That’s right, the CIA’s Clandestine Service is now advertising to fill out its ranks with what appear to be energetic young Americans from diverse backgrounds who never show their teeth when they smile. It seems a little crazy — who would expect to see spies recruiting on television? — but how, exactly, does one sell the CIA anyway?

(The ad in question)

I remember a class in business school in which we were all assigned to develop a complete marketing plan, including creative, to move an existing product in a new direction. My team had fun with a rather silly campaign for Purell hand cleanser, while another group went with a somewhat controversial product, the “hangover preventer” Chasers. They came up with high-quality creative that repositioned the product for heavy drinkers who regularly overindulged and therefore would buy the product in bulk. As a business decision, this repositioning makes sense; as an ethical act, well, it’s at the very least in a gray area.

But, ethical or not, the ads worked. Their message was simple: whatever stupid thing you did last night, at least you won’t have to worry about feeling miserable the next day. That’s a solid, effective message, and, best of all, it’s based on a benefit, not a feature, and it answers the consumer’s key question: “why should I care?”.

What’s the difference between features and benefits? A feature provides a benefit, and the benefit is what the consumer actually cares about and can visualize. For instance, airbags are the feature that provides the benefit of letting you walk away from an accident (“preventing injury” isn’t a solid way to express that benefit — the clear, easy-to-visualize concept of “walking away” is a “next step” the consumer both cares about and can visualize themselves doing); similarly, while Gatorade has the feature that it recharges your electrolytes, the benefit is that you can play hard through adversity, as their ads clearly show. For Chasers, the feature is that the product absorbs toxins; the benefit is that you can have fun the day after a night in which you also have fun (again, “you won’t have a headache” isn’t the best way to express that benefit — “have fun the day after” is a specific description of what the consumer cares about and something they can visualize themselves doing). When pitching a consumer product, it’s important to talk about benefits and not features (businesses typically maintain checklists of features they need, although benefits also need to be strongly communicated in a B2B sales context).

So how do you sell the CIA? The ad above is pretty good, because it creates a strong description of the group to which the target viewer wants to belong. Belonging and personal identity are both benefits, and are often used as the main message in ads (especially in the recruiting ads used by the US Armed Forces). Group membership isn’t the only benefit the CIA could have talked about, but, then you run into the ethical considerations that my classmates did with Chasers — can you really pitch James Bond’s activities and lifestyle as benefits? Well, apart from the beautiful women, I mean.

What wouldn’t have worked is a feature-based ad, one that said “see the world,” “learn hand-to-hand combat techniques,” “master foreign languages,” “fight al-Quaeda”. While those are all desirable features, using a feature list has two major problems:

• Not all segments will perceive all of the features as desirable (for instance, above, some people might be frightened by the chance they’d need hand-to-hand combat techniques, turning your list of features into a list of turn-offs)
• Features are spin-free, which means that someone else can come in with the interpretation of your features that sticks in the consumer’s head (“see the world… and kill someone in each of its different countries” is a very different spin than “see the world and learn about global markets so that you can later move into a lucrative career in private industry”).

With a controversial product, the CIA Clandestine Service needs to control its spin and send the right message to the right audience. Focusing on the benefit of identity, over the James Bond-style features that one thinks of when imagining the career of a spy, is a great way to do just that.