Nobody actually wants your product

Marketing legend Theodore Levitt told his students: "People don't want a quarter-inch drill — they want a quarter-inch hole." The drill is just a means to an end. What the customer is really "hiring" is the outcome: a shelf on the wall, a finished project, the feeling of a job done. This is the heart of positioning — you win customers by selling the result, not the object.

Most beginner marketing copy lists features: specs, ingredients, button counts, torque ratings. But features are what a product is; benefits are what the product does for me. "18-volt lithium battery" is a feature. "Hang every picture in your house before lunch" is a benefit. Customers care about themselves and their problem, not your engineering — so translate every feature into the change it creates in their life.

The deeper version, sometimes called Jobs To Be Done, reframes the whole thing: customers hire products to make progress in a specific situation. Understand the job — the hole, not the drill — and you'll know how to describe your product, who to target, and even what you're truly competing against (a drill also competes with hiring a handyman).