Your product bullets are backwards
🧭 Rating scales make every benefit look important, so use this forced-choice method to rank what buyers actually care about, and more!
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We break down the real strategies, decisions, and plays that actually move the needle in your marketing, and here it for today.
🧭 Rank your product benefits the way buyers actually do
Ask customers to rate ten benefits from 1 to 5, and eight will come back "very important." It looks like data, and it tells you nothing about order.
Order is what you need. The first bullet on a product page gets one benefit. So does the first line of an ad and the email subject line. A forced-choice method called best-worst scaling tells you which one.
How it works
Each screen shows four benefits. The respondent picks the most important and the least important. The next screen shows a different four.
Because people have to choose, ties disappear.
Build it
- Write 10 benefits in buyer language, one claim each. "Doesn't pill after washing" beats "premium fabric."
- Arrange them into eight screens of four, so each benefit appears about three times. Spread pairings so no two benefits share a screen too often.
- Randomize screen order for each respondent.
- Aim for 200 respondents who match your buyers. That's my judgment for stable rankings at this size.
Any survey tool that supports repeated multiple-choice questions can run this for free.
Watch for two mistakes. Leave price and discounts out, because they win every screen and crowd out the ranking you need. And keep claims at the same level, so a broad promise like "looks great" isn't competing with a narrow fact like "has pockets."
Score it
For each benefit: (times picked most − times picked least) ÷ times shown.
Scores run from −1 to +1. An illustrative result for a sweater brand:
- Doesn't pill: +0.52
- Machine washable: +0.31
- Ethically made: +0.04
- Gift-ready packaging: −0.38
If you'd rather skip building screens, SurveyMonkey reports which product benefits buyers prioritize, with the panel recruited and the analysis done for you. You can get started for free here.
Use it
- Product page: reorder bullets by score. Move anything below zero into the specs section.
- Ads: make the top two benefits your hook test, using your ad platform's free split-testing tool.
- Email: put the top benefit in your next subject line and the second in the preview text.
- Segments: compare scores for new and repeat buyers. If their top benefit differs, give repeat buyers their own email copy.
When to rerun
Rerun the study after a major product change or when a competitor shifts what shoppers expect. Benefit order drifts, and a page built on last year's ranking quietly loses conversions.
Pull your current product page bullets and rewrite them as ten buyer-language claims. That list is your study.
Partnership with AirOps
Your Buyers Aren’t Waiting for Better AI Measurement
Your buyers are asking AI what to buy. But when leadership asks which sales it drove, your attribution report doesn’t give you a clear answer. Waiting for one could mean losing buyers before they ever reach your site.
On October 15, join Matt Hammel, COO of AirOps, and Zak Prauer, Expert Partner, Marketing at Bain & Company, for a live conversation to help you:
- Understand why waiting for perfect measurement could cost more than investing in AI search today.
- See how AI search shapes brand preference, and why a recommendation carries more weight than a citation.
- Decide how to invest now and what evidence to demand that your spending is creating additional growth.
You’ll leave knowing how to make the case for AI search when “we can’t measure it yet” is what’s holding your budget back.
Can't attend the session live? Register anyway, and you’ll get the recordings in 24 hours.
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🥳 Events
🔥 How Top Brands Measure, Fund, and Scale Creator Marketing
October 21 | Online | Free Festival
Return on Influence Festival ’26 brings together teams from Adobe, Edelman, ŌURA, Ogilvy, and more to unpack how creator programs actually run. Learn how they measure ROI, justify budget, structure partnerships, and scale from 5 to 5,000 creators without adding chaos.
Can't attend every session live? Register anyway, and you’ll get the recordings in 24 hours.
Thanks for being part of the WAW team 💃 We’d love to know if this was helpful so we can continue playing it smart with the right strategies.