Branding Sub-Benefits

Sub-benefits are used in order to explain how your company is able to provide the emotional benefits it provides. Sub-benefits don’t fill the role of providing actual evidence for your company’s claims, however. Instead, these are emotionally charged statements. For Coke, its primary sub-benefit is that it’s the original cola “The Real Thing,” and is the most common soda. These things in turn help Coke position itself as the soda which provides happiness to the people who drink it.

The second purpose of sub-benefits is to help refine and differentiate two companies from each other. What becomes apparent when reviewing the list of possible good, emotional benefits is that there are a limited number of them, which means that many companies appear to have the same overarching benefits. Developing effective sub-benefits is how these companies differentiate from each other. The two largest department stores, for example, Wal-Mart and Target, both work to improve people’s lives, yet they are completely different companies. Wal-Mart works to improve people’s lives by helping them save money so that they can get more of the things they want. In addition, Wal-Mart works hard to adhere to a strict standard of family values, refusing to sell products such as computer games or movies which they feel violate this. Target, on the other hand, chooses to make people’s lives better by allowing them to save money on more stylish items. Because of this, Target costs a bit more then Wal-Mart but is presumably more likely to have the things that fashion-conscious customers want to buy in the first place. Target focuses its efforts on being socially conscious in a more fashionable way. It refuses to sell guns, for example, as a means of appealing to its customer base.

Certainly it’s true that Wal-Mart tried to imitate this form of social consciousness by making its suppliers use environmentally conscious packaging, selling organic products, etc. However, as it began to do this, it started to lose customers in same store sales. Wal-Mart’s primary customer base cared less about these things than they did about saving money. So as focusing on reducing the cost of social stewardship raised costs at Wal-Mart, their sales decreased. On the seemingly opposite end of the spectrum from Wal-Mart and Target, De Beers claims to make people’s lives better by making them feel nostalgic (creating memories), helping to build and symbolize love, and by lasting forever.

What we see, then, is that while these three companies (Target, Wal-Mart, and
De Beers) all have the same overarching brand, they prove that brand emotionally in very different ways allowing them to have different price points and different customers.