One of the first things that you’ll learn in business or marketing school is that you should focus on selling the benefits and not the features. While there are definitely people who want to hear about every feature and specification, the majority of consumers just want a simple question answered: “What can this product/service do for me?” They want to know how this product or service will make their life easier, more efficient, or more enjoyable.

I caught a television commercial yesterday for Qwest High-Speed Internet in the United States. For most home high-speed Internet services, we will hear about how one service is faster or how another service is more affordable. Qwest certainly recognizes those necessities too, but this particular ad focused on something different altogether. We see a teen/tween boy re-staging a series of childhood moments, because his parents lost the treasured family photos on their home computer. The mother character wanted all of these photo opportunities to be recreated.

The point that the teen/tween was trying to make is that the parents should have opted for the Qwest High-Speed Internet service, because it comes with a free (automatic) online backup service. This way, the pictures that were stored on the family computer could be easily recovered, even if the computer itself started to fail. I see a similar service (Eee Storage) offered by Asus with their Eee PC netbooks, though that is only a free trial; you need to subscribe to the service after the trial expires.

This online backup from Qwest sounds like it could be an excellent bonus and it’s clear that Qwest is selling the benefit. However, if you watch the commercial a little more carefully, you’ll notice one of the major features is mentioned very briefly and is not at all highlighted: storage capacity. The online backup service only supports up to 2GB per computer. Given the size of today’s digital pictures (and other media), two gigabytes is nowhere near enough for the modern family. You can easily buy a cheap SD card with more capacity than that.

In this way, you can see how selling the benefit can be more effective in attracting customers than selling the features. However, I found the Qwest ad to a little misleading and this may hurt them in the long run. What do you think?