In the early 1980s I heard that a customer always buys the benefit of a product. That made me interested, and I wanted to learn what a customer benefit is. With this knowledge I could probably improve my skills as a salesman and achieve better results. But there was also another interesting question that this matter raised. How many benefits are there? Thousands, hundreds, tens, or less? I started to look for the answers in the literature. After looking through numerous marketing books and articles, I recognized that customer benefit is one of the main concepts. Nevertheless, I could not find a satisfactory description of customer benefits, or an answer to the number of customer benefits.
This was the starting point for my study. And I m happy to share the results of my work with you now. I have considered both the B2C and B2B environment in the results. Consumers and companies experience the same benefits, but there can be a difference in the sources of the benefits, and there can also be different emphasis of the benefits. In B2B selling you need to take a note of all the various needs of the actors in the supply chain besides the needs of the end customer.
