Breaking the Marketing Rulebook: Why Features Matter More Than Ever for Modern POS Technology

I have spent most of my three decades in retail technology clinging tenaciously to the age-old marketing best practice of describing benefits rather than features. Because benefits, they tell you, are “the reason why people buy.” Benefits, they say, are “what matters to the customer.” To that end, marketing professors have for years declared that features are for amateurs. And most of the time, I suppose, they have been right.

So when we set out to develop a new microsite to help educate people about the value of Aptos ONE, our modern cloud POS platform, we began the content development process by describing the benefits, which are, to be sure, legit. Aptos ONE clients tend to achieve higher conversion rates, higher inventory productivity, better customer and associate experiences, and more selling opportunities inside and outside the store. And obviously, those tangible business impacts are things that matter to most potential customers and their shareholders.

But we quickly realized that simply articulating the benefits is nowhere near enough when marketing modern POS technology.

We realized that our potential POS clients must ask a lot of their stores if they hope to keep pace with customers’ expectations:

• They ask their stores to efficiently and effectively manage customer interactions that span channels, locations, journeys and fulfillment options.
• They expect associates to be high-performing sellers one minute and efficient order pickers the next.
• They expect associates to offer personalized service — no matter how many other things are currently on their plate.

To fulfill these expectations, potential POS clients will need to be able to empower their store associates with all the information, options and tools they need to manage all those tasks at their fingertips, no matter where they are in the store, no matter the type of device they have at hand.

Store associates must have easy access to real-time inventory, customer, order and promotion information on every device. They must have the flexibility to switch from fixed tills to mobile devices on a moment’s notice, they must be able to switch without dropping a transaction or feature just because they moved to a smaller screen, and they must have these capabilities configured to their specific roles according to their store’s specific policies.

Hence, when it comes to POS, we realized that the features are the benefits. If store associates don’t have the capabilities (i.e. features) they need to support these complex and wide-ranging interactions, customers simply won’t keep coming back to their stores. Features are, in fact, the gateway to the types of store experiences that lead to the business benefits that shareholders desire.

So when we began developing content for our aforementioned modern POS microsite, we went against the counsel of marketing professors everywhere and wrote about the long list of capabilities included with Aptos ONE. In fact, we actually led with “features”:

Not only did we put “feature” in the headline, we went all in on the product’s features:

Time will tell if going against the grain by going all in on features was a smart move or not. But we did it because we really do believe that when it comes to whether or not a modern POS platform is a legitimate solution for the challenges facing the modern store, the features are the benefits.

Store associates need features because store customers demand them. It’s really that simple.

And to all my marketing professors from my years at San Diego State University … sorry, not sorry.