Mike AndesFounder, Augusta Lawn Care and Homeworks · Founder of Homeworks and Augusta Lawn Care

Go one level deeper. Sell the benefit of the feeling.

16 May 2026 · 0 min

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In this brief segment, Mike Andes and a co‑speaker discuss a core marketing principle: truly understand the buyer and zero in on a single, dominant pain point rather than scattering messaging across many possible concerns. They stress that effective copy should move beyond describing a product feature to articulating its primary benefit, and then further to the "benefit of the benefit"—the deeper emotional payoff that solves the buyer’s core problem. This deeper empathy is illustrated with a turnaround case for a pool‑fence company, where the marketing shift focused on the ultimate outcome (parents gaining peace of mind and time to relax) rather than just the safety feature itself.

If you could just master that one thing of really understanding your buyer and then speaking to the one thing instead of 90 things that they might be feeling and zeroing in on that, creating the pain and then relieving the pain, then you, everything will perform so much better.
When I was looking at hiring for this, the marketing manager role is like, can they go one level deeper and not just speak about the feature but the benefit? But then also like the 2.0 version is can they speak to the benefit of the benefit? And that's where I feel like it gets to the core problem that's actually being solved to speak to and show empathy through the copy. Yes. And so I, I'm reminded of like, uh, when we did a turnaround for a pool fence company and they're doing around $14 million and they did the fencing around pools to keep kids from falling in.
Yep.
And the immediate benefit is, hey, you don't have to, like, the kid does not fall into the pool, they don't drown. Huge opportunity. It's fear. And I said, can we go one level deeper? Which is the benefit to that benefit is now as the very busy, stressed out mom of 4 kids, they can go play in the backyard and you don't have to worry. And you can take that time inside apart from them and know that you're, they're not gonna fall in the pool. And that's like the benefit of the benefit is the time alone to be able to take 20 minutes and decompress and not be looking out the window every 3 minutes to make sure no one's, you know, fall inside the pool.