As The Manufacturer, I Do Not Hate Middleman At All.

You all get familiar with telling your customers what your product is, how your product is like, and why they should choose you. But many B2C product pages actually do really bad on this. Those operation people or content creators only tell product features but no product benefits. That’s totally wrong. You need to realize that customers care about benefits they get from your product, not features.

Let's take it from an example. The 360° Camera on your sedan—this is the product feature. The 360° Camera helps you park safely, confidently, and accurately in any complicated, crowded urban area, like the roadside in Manhattan or the challenging uphill areas in San Francisco. You never need to carefully maneuver your sedan back and forth, enduring the annoying, continuous honking from drivers blocked by you.

This is the product benefit of the 360° Camera. You need to tell your customers what benefit your product will provide to them and why this feature is worthy of investment. Don’t let them explore it themselves because they are busy. Some of you may say people with experience will realize that without your notification. That’s correct! But what about potential customers who do not know how to drive yet? What about people planning to go to New York City but are unaware of how challenging parking can be?

Are you going to ignore them? Remember, the fundamental way of making a profit in business is satisfying your customer’s needs at a suitable price. Tell your customers how your product satisfies their needs directly. Don’t just list several features and let them guess. They are all very busy now, so save their time and let them know your product benefits in a short time.

But what if Mike chose option 2, to "Ask middlemen"?

All he needs to do is send all requirements to several middlemen. "I don’t care if any single supplier is more affordable or another single supplier ships fast. I make the decision, but middlemen do all the other jobs." Mike only needs to make the choice of several different suppliers with all the details because the middlemen who have been in the label industry for many years must have many more suppliers than Mike. And Mike can repeat those easy processes for all his other procurement tasks. These middlemen know how to analyze and choose suppliers more than Mike, who is just new to this industry. That’s why those large-sized companies’ procurement teams still work with middlemen instead of working with manufacturers directly. Middlemen make money not just from the price difference; the main job is to help you cover the complexity of suppliers.

But what if the products I am going to procure are very simple and concentrated?

Good question. Then here is the second advantage of middlemen.