- Daniel Joyner
- Dec 15, 2025
- 5 min read
Table of Contents:
Standing out among your competitors means having a strong product with clear features that your audience can develop a relationship with. Though having an array of useful and attractive product features may seem like a given, many businesses can find themselves in the habit of creating products that intuitively feel correct for their target market and audience but aren’t exactly performing as hoped. Here, we’ve broken down the best ways to understand your most profitable product features, along with pinpointing some key methods for product value data collection and analysis.
What Are Product Features?
Product features can be most easily defined as the actionable benefits of an item. These features can be broken up into two parts: the features that the consumer wants to know, and the features a brand wants the consumer to know. Essentially, a brand is looking to build credibility while appealing to both the logical needs of a consumer and their emotions. Through product features, a brand aims to answer the central “why,” “what,” and “how” questions its target market will have before committing to a purchase. These questions are commonly:
“Why should I buy this product?”
“What does this product do?”
“How is this product different from a similar product another brand offers?”
Nowadays, most consumers are very savvy, empowered shoppers. For a customer to develop a genuine relationship with a product that leads to either loyalty or repurchase, product features must speak to four central areas: functionality, appearance, performance, and added value. Even though appearance brings aesthetic appeal and value, performance brings awe, and added value brings the thrill of bonus benefits; functionality is, above all else, the most important feature for a brand to nail.
At the end of the day, to draw trial and repurchase activity, a product must be usable and beneficial. It needs to do exactly what it promises while assisting a consumer with accomplishing a goal or eliminating a pain point.
For example, if a laundry detergent has a fantastic container design, a calming smell, and includes eco-friendly ingredients, these features have the potential to appeal to a wide consumer base. However, you’ll often find that surveys, Attitude & Usage, Discrete Choice, and Concept Testing, communicate that a consumer’s first and foremost concern is how effectively that laundry detergent will clean their items. All other features become moot without function. It sets the basis for every other complementary, design, or performance-related feature that can allow you to connect with consumers at a more emotional level, all while inspiring belief and confidence in your product.
How Can I Collect Data About the Product Features My Audience Values?
Ultimately, the best way to gain insight about which product specs your audience cares most about is by connecting with them directly. Attitudinal data sources collected through voluntary surveys deliver an honest and robust overview of which product features alienate your target market and which ones have them coming back for more. Different attitudinal surveys help clearly identify how a consumer feels about their purchase and what their most and least preferred aspect of their purchase are. Two popular survey types to explore this include:
Regret Surveys: Assesses a consumer’s unhappiness or regret about their purchase. For a soda product, a consumer may express regret about a health-related concern (“I wish I had chosen a lower-calorie beverage”) or a financial-related concern (“I regret spending so much money on this beverage”).
MaxDiff Surveys: Designed to assess the importance of certain product features and benefits through hierarchical preferences. Using the soda example again, a MaxDiff survey may list out attributes like price, taste, brand recognition, and size availability; from here, consumers can rank these attributes from least to most important.
With these surveys, a brand can get a better grasp on which features are worth promoting and which can be replaced with more marketable attributes.
How Can a Brand Assess a Consumer’s Willingness to Pay (WTP)?
One feature that many brands may not spend enough time optimizing is pricing. This often neglected part of marketing can yield a significant return on investment when addressed properly: Studies have shown that optimizing a brand’s pricing strategy offers four times the return than a primary focus on acquisition and retention strategies.
In this instance, a conjoint analysis, which is a quantitative statistical model most often used to assess the way consumers value certain product features, is the most effective survey choice. Conjoint surveys aim to gather insight about questions such as:
At what price is the product Too Cheap (quality is suspect)?
At what price is the product a Bargain (good value)?
At what price is the product Expensive (but you might still buy it)?
At what price is the product Too Expensive (you would not buy it)?
By using a conjoint survey and analysis technique, brands can more efficiently understand what product features most drive a consumer’s willingness to pay, which then helps a brand figure out the optimal price point for a product.
Why Should I Analyze My Audience’s Interest in Specific Product Features?
Collecting and analyzing consumer behavior data, such as receipts, social media activity, and website engagement, helps highlight which product features your audience is drawn to. This data can communicate which areas of your current product adequately meet the needs of the customer and which features can be altered to address these needs.
Sometimes, certain attitudinal or behavioral data may yield conflicting patterns. Let’s take a hypothetical soup brand, for example. The driving motivation of a younger millennial segment’s feature preference can be its GMO-free and eco-conscious ingredients, while another segment that is composed of adults over 65 years old may gravitate toward the product’s heart-healthy, low-sodium recipe. Though both segments prefer this particular soup brand over its competitors, they are for very different reasons. Understanding these conflicting patterns gives a brand an opportunity to nurture both of these markets with product features that address these core concerns.
How Can Information About Consumer Product Feature Preferences Be Useful for Brands and Businesses?
At Circana, we offer a variety of data solutions for brands that are looking for a holistic analysis of product features. With this information, companies can benefit from a better understanding of the competitor landscape and a deeper insight into the driving factors behind product performance. Exploring a customer’s preference and opinion about the most prominent features of your product allows brands to differentiate themselves from your competitors while simultaneously refining any underperforming products.
Our Unfiy+ tool simplifies report analysis and trend visualization, making it easy to explore and share the data that is most relevant to your product feature development efforts. If you’d like more information about how Unify+ can benefit you and your team, feel free to reach out to us today.
Identifying Product Feature Value Data FAQ Section
How Do I Write Product Features?
When writing product features, you must always explain what the product is, what it does, and how it can positively impact your target audience’s life. The goal is to elicit both a logical response through functionality and innovative design and an emotional response through complementary benefits.
H3: What Are the Most Important Features of a Product?
The most important features of a product are:
Core Functionality: Does this product work well and solve the problem it is intended to solve? Is this product convenient, and does it make my life easier?
Quality and Performance: Is this product reliable? Can I trust this product to last long-term? What durability benefits does this product have?
A product that does not work and cannot be trusted cannot experience longevity, so it is important to address these product specs first and foremost.
