Aug 25

I face this questions umpteen number of times as hire Technical Product Managers & Product Managers. As always, there are people (Colleagues, Reference Providers, and Interviewers etc.) who tell me how certain candidate will be a good fit as a Product Manager. And since there are many panel members who interview the prospective Product Management candidate I always hear things like ‘this person would suite well as he/she has lot of domain experience’ or ‘this person won’t be able to do the job as his/her domain experience is not strong’.

I don’t know why but I never understand why people think on those lines. I always feel that Product Manager needs to be a ‘package’ (as shown in the picture below) rather than lump of domain knowledge or few strong skills. Of course among all the required skills, domain (business area) & functional (product management) will typically come out as major requirements but in my opinion having them/not having them shouldn’t dictate the effectiveness of Product Manager.

Product Manager Skills

In my opinion, how much of domain or functional knowledge is important depends a whole lot on the product in question, stage it is in its life-cycle,  the industry it serves, and customer problem it solves.  If you are supplying in niche business areas then the product manager must be at least understand the business. But if you are supplier of generic products then domain experience should not be the dictator as domain can be quickly learned by a good product management professional.

When hiring domain expert as product manager you are assuming that domain expert can ‘represent the customer’. With all due respect to their domain expertise, generally I have seen that, domain experts will have strong opinions and hence may not be bring in the ‘openness’ required to represent the needs of customer, which is one of the most important attribute of a good Product Manager.

My experience suggests that if you have a good product manager, it is easier for them to gain domain knowledge (most can do that within matter of months), than a domain expert trying to learn how to become a product manager.  The main reason for such thing to happen is because domain experience is gained over years of experience (typically 10+ years) and by the time you become domain expert your ability to learn product management skills (which are mostly soft skills) will be significantly lower (just plain human physiology & psychology :) ) unless the person is broad minded and willing to put an extra effort to learn new skills.

But this is how I think, what do you think?

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Jul 29

I have come across numerous product developers and managers who think Customer will always complain and have negative feedback on the product irrespective of whatever great things you do in your product. I don’t think their assessment is entirely wrong but such interpretation may make them miss on opportunities which could earn them quick brownie points from Customers. What is more perplexing is that such product folks use filter strategy (‘buraa mat suno’ i.e. ‘do not hear bad things’ in Mahatma Gandhiji’s words) as soon as they hear anything negative about the product from the Customer. These product folks either start defending their product or divert the conversation to more positive things about the product.

Invariably what happens is that even though the Customer may be neutral/positive about the product because of unwillingness of the product owners to listen to their feedback they start feeling indifferent or sometimes even hostile about using that product. Over the period such Customers either stop providing constructive feedback or just switch to a different product (unless there is heavy switching cost built into the product).

In reality the customer feedback either in early stages of product development or after product can provide us with many opportunities. For example, the feedback could actually help us make product work better or address customer needs better. In some cases I have seen that the customer just wants somebody to listen to how they are unable to address their needs with the current product and it is because customer really doesn’t know how to use the product or is unaware of the feature which already addresses that need. But the issue is that most product owners are not open to listen about the complaints.

While we always want to know why customers love our products I encourage product developers or owners to ask questions like following to elicit qualitative constructive feedback from the customer without directly getting into critical conversation

  1. If you could change one thing about our Product what would that be? Why?
  2. What is that one thing that you would like to see improved in our product? Why?
  3. Which particular feature in our product is has chance of creating confusion? Why?

Answers to above questions will provide great insights on product weaknesses, which will not only allow you to take your product to the next level but also improve the customer satisfaction. Such delighted customers will then act as product evangelist, which in turn will get you new customers.

On a lighter note, if we don’t pay heed to customer inputs on what they don’t like in our products then it won’t be very long before we see following cartoon becoming reality.

Reliable Products

Source: http://www.cartoonistgroup.com/

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Jun 09

In my opinion strategy requires vision hence product strategy must begin with a vision that outlines in which direction product needs to go, how it will get there, and why it will be successful.

There are many tools and techniques such as Blue Ocean Strategy Framework, BCG Framework, & McKinsey / General Electric Matrix etc., which help in analysis of product portfolios. But there is very little help available for Product Managers in terms of tools and techniques to help build their product strategy. Although tools like SWOT analysis help Product Managers in understanding where their product stands viz-a-viz competition Product Managers mostly rely on their gut feel to identify the direction their products need to take.

General tendency to go about product strategy is to figure out what most important or strategic customers want and then just build that into the product. The issue with such approach is that organization’s most vocal or important customer may not be necessarily representing the entire customer base (current & potential). Such strategy (or lack of it) may not allow Business/Product Managers to broaden the horizons to build profitable business around their products.

Management Guru Michael Porter has laid out some generic strategies to competitively differentiate [1]

  1. Price differentiation (Example: Low-cost Manufacturer)
  2. Product/Service differentiation (Example: Apple, RIM (Blackberry), Any successful niche retailers; (e.g. The Perfume Shop); or specialist holiday operator (e.g. Carrier)
  3. Focus based differentiation (Example: Small retailers featuring own-label or discounted label products)

PorterGenericStrategies

Figure: Porter’s Generic Competitive Strategies

Assuming that your organization follows one of the above mentioned competitive differentiation strategy one can use following steps to come up with product strategy

  1. Identify the market & size of market you want to play in as per your corporate strategy
  2. Identify your products & companies strengths, weaknesses, & threats
  3. Identify areas where you see opportunities
  4. Build your product strategy (inline with your corporate competitive strategy) after choosing the areas of opportunities whereby you can leverage your strengths
  5. Create a plan on how you will get your product to reach the vision
  6. Identify measure of success at every major milestones
  7. Start working the plan to achieve the vision you have set out for your product
  8. Continuously evaluate how your product is performing as compared to measure of success you have laid out and revisit the plan if required

But again, that’s how I would do it…what steps do you follow when building your product strategy?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_generic_strategies

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May 05

Who says building products is not fun :)

1. Dilbert on Product Strategy

Dilbert on Product Strategy

2. Dilbert on User Requirements

Dilbert - I cant start the project because user wont give me his requirements

3. Dilbert on User Training

Dilbert on User Training

4. Dilbert on Software Architects

Dilbert on Architect

5. Dilbert on Customer Centricity

Dilbert on User Experience - Boss Hiding

6. Dilbert on Customer & their Requirements

Dilber on Customer Requirements

7. Dilbert on New Product Line

Dilbert on New Product Line

8. Dilbert on Cool Product

Dilbert - iPod Killer Product

9. Dilbert on Product Positioning StrategyDilbert Dogbert as VP of Marketing

Feb 28

Do you think your customers know what they want?

If you answered yes then maybe you need to think again…More often than not your potential customers don’t know what (products) they want. But they definitely know what problem they want to get solved or what needs they want to get addressed. And it is up to the solution provider to figure out what solution or how their solution will address the customer problem or needs.

The simple example is a case wherein customer is looking for some food (the solution) because customer is hungry (the problem). What is solution provider’s role? It is to figure out many things before you food plate of food in front of that customer. The examples of thing, which need to be figured out, are

  1. What type of food this customer likes?
    • Veg/Non-Veg, Hot/Cold, Spicy/Non-Spicy, Regional/Continental etc.
  2. What quantity or potion of food will suffice this customer?
    • Small, Medium or Large etc.
  3. How much will this customer be willing to pay for food?
    • $1, $5, $10 or $100 etc.

I am sure the list can keep growing but I guess you get the point. The first issue I see is that most organizations assume that they either know what customer wants or assume that customer does not know what want before they provide the solution. Instead the best thing to do would be to dig deeper to understand needs – expressed, underexpresed, and unexpressed. Most organizations get so ‘(their) product/solution’ centric that they forget to uncover or understand what problem customer wants to be solved and focus way too much on ‘why their company product is best on in the market’.

Having said that it still does not mean that customer will tell you ‘what he/she exactly needs’ instead they will communicate ‘what they think will solve his/her problem’ and what customer may not realize is that what they think will solve their problems may not necessarily be the best solution for the customer. You may have seen the following picture many times but it provides such a relevant insight that I can’t resist showing it here.

CustomerRequirements

No wonder Henry Ford said

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Okay that may be an extreme statement and I am sure if Mr. Ford had dug deeper he would have understood that his customer wanted ‘transport mechanism to travel faster’, which would have lead him to believe that since he cannot get horse to run any faster he must design something that can do that…and hence justified the need for a ‘car’.

As you can see, it is again the responsibility of solution provider to figure out what will serve the customer best and offer that as a solution…sometimes it may mean tweaking your company solution or offering suggestion on why your company solution will not fit the purpose but solution from some other company. Now, that’s the most difficult part but if you want our customer to come back to you then we must resist the temptation to ‘sell’ your product and provide a suggestion that is ‘right’ for the customer. Is that too much to ask for?

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Jan 22

No matter what type of products or services your organization offers, to be a successful it must innovate and monetize innovations on an ongoing basis. The truth is although innovation is a crucial component of business strategy the process of innovation may seem difficult to manage.

Many companies have no systematic innovation program to allow the employees to work on innovative ideas or concepts on a regular basis. Of course, in matured organizations such as GE, P&G, & 3M etc., systematic innovation has become part of their DNA as innovation has been instilled into the system over the decades. Nevertheless, every organization tries to innovate one way or other i.e. some have systematic innovation programs and some just happen to embark upon innovative ventures as and when required.

When one starts analyzing systematic innovation programs one finds that the organizations, which follow such programs are generally able to allocate enough resources & finances to fund such programs. Such organizations are not cash strapped and since they have reaped the benefits of such programs they know that the results far outweigh the investments. In other words the biggest obstacle of not knowing the potential in running such program is already overcome in such organizations.

What you may also find is that such organizations, which practice systematic innovation, follow some model or other and try to cover their three horizons [1] short term, moderate term, and long term of their businesses.

Three Horizons Framework

On the other hand most organizations, which do not have such programs, either are okay with not having such program or get into what can be called as ‘analysis paralyses’. Since the potential of such program is not known most organizations are always challenging the concept on whether it is right thing to do. Some organizations even start the innovation programs on trial basis but tend to abandon the program when it does not succeed within first few attempts.

Such organizations then rely on opportunistic innovation or innovation by accident, which may or may not lead to successful innovations. But then as long it serves organizations purpose and as the cost of running (or should I say not running) is not high, such organizations keep innovating one way or other. Some such organizations even enjoy success when they are able to monetize the innovation.  In cases where such innovations cannot be monetized the organizations keep trying till they succeed or ultimately wind up innovative attempts (and subsequently entire organization) because of subsequent failures.

So the question is NOT which one is better, systematic or haphazard innovation? The question is do you know what innovation model your organization follows? Do you think you need to have systematic innovation program rather than haphazard or vice versa? If you do then do you know how to move from one paradigm to another?

To build a systematic innovation program an organization (i.e. the creators of the program) must understand that innovation process has discrete stages such as idea generation and mobilization, screening and advocacy, experimentation, commercialization, and diffusion and implementation. Organizations who want to build a successful systematic innovation program will have to use an outlined innovation process to create a common framework for discussion and initiatives around the innovation process, and then establish metrics and goals for each stage of the innovation process. If you want your organization to move into ‘systematic innovation’ program because doing vice versa is neither required nor recommended I highly recommend you read the article ‘Crafting organizational innovation processes’ [2].

[1] Mehrdad Baghai, Stephen Coley, and David White, The Alchemy of Growth, New York: Perseus Publishing, 1999

[2] Crafting organizational innovation processes

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Dec 01

My observation is that most organizations do not pay attention to the product usability while building their products. The myriad reasons, cited by misinformed product managers, product developers or management executives for not being able to address product usability during its development, are categorized under various headings below

Neglector

  • Usability is not that important as long as right Technology choice is made and user is informed about such great ‘Technology’ decision
  • Customer is waiting on this product release and there is very little time to do justice to feature functions we won’t be able to meet the dates

The Neglectors fail to understand the importance of product usability and how it affects great customer experience. Many times such Neglectors are in power positions and can influence the product direction and release without being formal owner of that product. Probably best way to deal with Neglectors is to make them understand on periodic basis (as one time effort won’t cut it) how product usability translates into great user experience and then in turn how it affects the company revenues.

Procrastinator

  • Don’t have time to look at the product usability as the product must be launched as quickly as possible (presumably to gain first mover advantage)
  • Build the feature/functions first then usability can be improved later through user feedback

The Procrastinators are the quick fixers, who either do not think things through or have knack of doing things in hurry. Probably best way to handle Procrastinators is to make them aware about how the product will not meet customer needs and hence it wouldn’t matter whether product is delivered on time or has all the functions. As long as user thinks they can’t they use the product effectively they will avoid using it as well as recommending it.

Overconfident

  • Usability is not that important because user is necessarily not the buyer or may not be able to influence the buying decision
  • Usability does not determine product popularity/salability as there are many other factors, which determine product success
  • Good marketing campaign can always overcome any lacunae in the product usability or feature/functions

The Overconfidents belittle the importance of product usability as these people think they can always (almost always) talk others (including customers) through (or almost brainwash) why their opinion is always right.  These are the most difficult people to convince as they have already made a judgment. Probably the best way to deal with such people is to continuously show them examples of how product usability translates to improved ROI. You may also want to pursue such people to an extent that they start understanding how they can become more effective if they sell the idea of great customer experience.

I am sure we can come up with few more categories and few more reasons of why people think product usability is not as important as it should. But that is not the objective and with given examples I hope you got the point. As you can see many (includes product managers, product developers, managers and executives)  in the organizations can come up with great reasons for not being able to work on product usability and some wouldn’t even stop from daring to ask the question ‘Who cares about product usability?’.

In my opinion people don’t buy products or feature functions they buy solutions to solve their problems. Therefore, the usability product delivers is directly proportional to the level of satisfaction user experiences through the use of product. My argument is that higher the product usability (or even service for that matter), which is in turn equal to great user experience, more satisfied and loyal the user base of the product will be. And when the user base of the product is loyal the organizations will not only benefit in the up market but will also be able to maintain stronghold in the down market.

I am sure my logic can appear faulty to many so here is an example, which illustrates the importance of delivering great user experience. Some investors set up an UX Fund to understand how great user experience is directly proportional to success of the companies.

As you can read on their web site, the UX Fund is an investment experiment inspired by people, who believed that companies that deliver a great user experience will see it reflected in their stock price.

The fund is comprised of 10 companies that the investors felt provide great user experience through their products. You can read more about the companies they chose & why they chose them on their website. The fund invested $50,000 USD (about $5,000 in each company) on November 1, 2006 and shares were held at least for 1 year. The performance of fund in first 1 year was whopping 39.3% and outperforming Nasdaq, S&P 500, Nasdaq 100 & NYSE. Is that some proof or what?

uxfund1-Nov2007

Now, I understand that some of you may have reservations as the 1 year performance data was taken on November 2007, which is no longer relevant. Therefore, here is the snapshot of the performance of the same fund as I write this article today.

UXFund-01Dec09

As you can see only among other indexes compared earlier only NASDAQ100 has barely managed to be in the green while the UX fund shows the return of approximately 15%.

On the basis of data I have provided, how would you rate the importance of the product usability i.e. delivering great user experience?

Do you still believe that product usability can or should be an afterthought?

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Nov 23

Figure1-Crossing the chasm

Figure 1 – Crossing the Chasm

As seen in the picture above, when you read ‘Crossing the Chasm’, you will understand the importance of ‘Early Adopters’ i.e. the idealists, who have the insight to match an emerging technology to a strategic opportunity and willingly take high risks to pursue that goal, for a start-up. But at the same time the book makes it very clear how important it is to think about the ‘Early Majority’ i.e. the pragmatists, who care about lot of things such as company they are buying from, the quality of the product they are buying, the infrastructure of supporting products and system interfaces, and the reliability of the service they are going to get, in order to succeed in the long term. Although, it is well understood and widely accepted that the ‘chasm’ between Early Adopters & Early Majority is start-up killer it is the next chasm between ‘Early Majority’ & ‘Late Majority’ i.e. the conservatives, which kills many established organizations.

The reason I say that is because many established organizations (which have evolved from being Startups) forget that the requirements of their existing Customers (i.e. Early Majority) are different from their prospective Customers (i.e. Late Majority). More often than not they let their existing customers dictate what they build as products instead of trying to understand what their new customers need for their company to move from Early Majority to Later Majority customers. Such decisions are taken by organizations for variety of reasons such as

  1. Customer Power: The existing customer(s) who is(are) too powerful to be ignored (generally a big elephant, whom you don’t want to p**s off).
  2. Missing Product Strategy & Vision: The organization lacks people who understands the importance of product strategy or when such people exist they are not listened to
  3. Lack of Money: This happens when you suddenly find your great product not selling as you want it to (may be because of cheap or better competition, bad economy, lack of cash because of mistakes made by organization)
  4. Operational Inefficiencies: Some organizations are just structured in such as way that it is difficult for them to monetize an innovation for variety of reasons such as internal politics, inability to market innovations, and inefficient operational control at the CxO level to bring things in order

The point is that whatever the reasons may be, some organizations forget to bring in both the ‘existing’ & ‘prospective’ customer at the CENTER before evolving their product strategy. Such organizations are generally DRIVEN by one/two MAJOR customers and their products reflect the usage philosophy of the solutions desired by ‘power’ customers. There is no doubt that with some extra efforts such products can still be sold to other customers BUT these products will never become the BEST OF BREED as they have been ‘engineered’ to solve specific problems of FEW customers. On the contrary, the other types of organizations, who do not let their ‘power’ customers drive their products, and focus on the whole market (existing & prospective) rather than few customers, generally (I say generally because even after taking such steps you can see products becoming disasters for different reasons), tend to succeed at creating BEST of BREED products.

The question is should an organization be Customer Driven or Customer Centric? In my opinion the answer depends on where in the curve you are & what type of organization DNA you have. If you are a startup, who needs early adopters then sure you must be customer driven because you probably have one or two major customers and you don’t meet their requirements you are probably going to be out of business sooner than later.

But when you are an established organization and if you don’t drive your products then somebody else will – as explained earlier most likely your most demanding customer, which may not be the right thing for your other REMAINING customers. Therefore, although it good to have big & demanding customer, who can act as an elephant, which will carry you through the chasm it wouldn’t be prudent to ride on its back for too long as it may take you places where you (& hence your product) shouldn’t go. Therefore, for an established organization it’s always better to be customer centric (focusing on majority of your customers) than being customer driven (by major customer(s)).

Do you have any thoughts?

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Nov 09

When you ‘Google’ around on MBA concentrations/majors and you will find that most b-schools offer concentrations such as Accounting, Finance , General Management , Human Resource Management, Marketing, Supply Change Management , most of which lead to specialty required in managing that particular horizontal/vertical in the business. If you spend little more time you will also find that some b-schools also provide majors in Entrepreneurship, Health Care Management, Real Estate, Multinational/Global Business Management , and Technology etc., which are either specific to particular industry or are horizontals among myriad types of businesses.

Now, let us look at the organization structures of companies, which build products (and here I mean real physical/tangible products i.e. anything produced & not the marketing definition of products, which says ‘anything that can be offered to a market that might satisfy a want or need’[1] ), which addresses satisfies the want/need of potential consumers. Close inspection of the organization charts will provide you an insight that most MBA concentrations/majors are tied to what their top bosses do on daily basis. For example, major in Finance goes after CFO role, major in Marketing goes after CMO role, major in HR goes after Head of HR role, other top roles are either generally in Global Management/Engineering organizations, for which either Global Business Management/Technology major comes handy. Also, now days most b-schools offer courses/majors in Executive Management, which fills the gaps for most of the top roles. Now, that leaves few holes first and foremost being Sales and among other is Product Management.

To be fair let us also look from the employee perspectives to make sure that we take bottom up approach in to the account as well. Most employees will be one among many concept thinkers/managers (product managers/architects), concept implementers (engineers/developers), concept validators (testers/QA), concept marketers (marketing), concept sellers (sales), or can be categorized in support functions such as HR, Accounting, Facilities, IT etc. However, if you look closely at what formal education is available for concept thinkers/managers, who generally decide (of course after doing enough customer research & analysis), what products should be built then you will find that the answer is not very encouraging.

Of course, there are majors such as Strategic Management and some b-schools also offer electives in product management and some cover few courses in Entrepreneurship but I don’t think that’s enough. Why? Because most of these courses are too high level and do not allow business students to get their hands dirty on creating a roadmap or product requirement specification. Such courses also do not allow business students to get the ‘real world’ picture of how product/concepts should be managed, which could include tasks such as concept rationalization, business case creation, technology assessment, use case scenarios, management of product contract with product implementation teams, pricing of the product, demo of product, competitive analysis for the product, and collateral creation for the product etc., on daily basis. Performing all of the above tasks is very much important to be successful product management professional in the real world business.

Now I am sure some of the above tasks will get covered in some major or other but Product Management is a real role, why someone should just not be able opt for such major and have career in Product Management?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_(business)

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Oct 26

After building/looking at many products, working in different product organizations and being a customer (buyer or consumer) of many products I have come to belief that Product Managers must understand their Product Promise and plan to deliver their products based on strong product pillars. Simply put, Product Promise cannot be delivered without understanding Product Pillars.

The first question, which one may ask is ‘what is a product promise’?

A product promise is the implied commitment made to customers by a company. It embodies everything that the company, brand, marketing, features and benefits and product description convey. Put simply, a product promise is kept if the customer has an experience that is at least as good as what they expected based on what the company told them beforehand [1].

The next logical question would then be ‘what are these product pillars about’?

The product pillars form the logical backbones for the products, which if taken into account correctly allow the organizations to deliver product promise. The main product pillars for any products are Affordability, Suitability, Reliability, and Extensibility.

The question may arise…aren’t product pillars similar to product attributes then?

The answer is NO. Product attributes reside in the product, while benefits reside in the customer. For example, a cigarette can have reduced nicotine content (a concrete attribute), providing the customer the benefit of a less harmful smoking experience. Or basketball shoes can have extra support around the ankle (an attribute), reducing the wearer’s chance of injury [2]. On the other hand product pillars are subjective upholders of the product, which may or may not reside in the product. For example, some product pillars such as Reliability & Extensibility reside in the product but Affordability & Suitability are perceptions about the product.

The Product Pillars

Now let us talk about the most common product pillars, which must be put in place to deliver the product promise.

Affordable does not mean either priced low or high but it’s priced appropriately for the market it supposed to serve. For example, if iPhone is priced too low then it will lose its sheen on being a premium product but if priced too high may not become widely used gadget. In short, the product must be appropriately priced for it to be within affordable range of prospective customers.

Suitable products most likely fall in the category of being right fit for the job. For example, Blackberry phones are suitable to be used by executives but may not be right for youngsters, who want to play music on their phone. Suitability of the product is important to make sure that the product delivers what is expected by the buyer.

Having Suitable product is not enough but it has to be Reliable as well. What’s point in having a Blackberry or iPhone but not able to do what one wants to do with it on a consistent basis to obtain predictable results. Imagine someone buys an iPod, which does not allow the buyer to listen to different types of music without failing once during every song or giving noisy sound in the middle of the song. Would you consider buying unreliable product? I won’t. In essence Reliable pillar supports the responsibility of product being stable, usable & predictable.

Extensible is one of the most commonly ignored pillars of the products. When a consumer buys an electronic gadget today, but cannot extend its use after 6 months (whatever may be the reason such as technology upgrade or customer needs get changed etc.) then majority of the consumers will decide not to buy such gadget or least postpone the decision to buy such product. The obvious reason being no one wants own obsolete product or product, which becomes obsolete fairly quickly. Although this pillar makes more sense for Electronic & IT type of products the principle remains that majority of consumers would want some assurance that the products they buy today will not become obsolete tomorrow.

In conclusion, I strongly believe that organizations that don’t understand the product pillars, and do not use them to build their products will rarely succeed in the long run. On the contrary, organizations, which build their products on the strong foundation of product pillars, will be able to deliver the product promise and generally command a respect among their customers.

[1]Is Your Product Promise Really A Promise? http://www.aipmm.com/html/newsletter/archives/000048.php

[2] What’s the difference between a product attribute and a product benefit? http://www.marketingprofs.com/Faqs/showfaq.asp?ID=89&CatID=4

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