The other day I was flipping through the pages of “Women” from Charles Bukowski.
And you guessed it, it’s a book about women, sex and booze, as seen from the eyes of a chronic alcoholic writer.
Anyways, inside the book Charles tells a story about how a friend of his, Bobby wanted to hook him up with his wife, Valerie.
But Valerie was no ordinary case either…
When Booby introduced Valerie to his parents, they had commented on her dress -- that they liked it very much.
Her reply?
“Well, what about the rest of me?”
She had pulled her dress over her hips. And she didn’t have any panties on.
What’s that?
You ask what do Valerie’s missing panties have to do with your products?
If there’s a lesson that we could take from the cuckoo house Valerie, is that she knew how to stand out.
Standing out is the layman’s term for Unique Selling Proposition — which seems to be the buzzword crawling out of marketers’ mouths when a client’s monthly sales take a nosedive.
No matter how you put it though...
Unless you’re selling luxury cocktail ice from Alaska (yup, it’s a thing)...
...you’ll need to figure out how to stand out like a flamingo in the flock of your pigeon-competition.
But what does standing out really means at the end of the day?
What would it be like to stand out from your competition in a way that customers pick you over them?
And how do you position yourself to become the only logical choice in your customer’s mind?
Stick around and we’ll get to all of these in a minute.
First, let’s look at how most companies try to make their products or services unique.
They shoot emails. They call meetings. They cram their employees in a conference room, shove coffee and pastry in their faces and have them brainstorm cutesy stuff about…
...how many years they’ve been in the industry...
...or how great their quality of service is…
… or about how they’re the best in their market.
But peppering the words “innovative”… “disruptive”… and “high-quality” in your marketing doesn’t make you unique.
This roadblock shows up when we search for uniqueness looking inwards.
It’s like trying on a dress that’s meant to be a gift for your wife.
Because your product or service is meant for your customer, not you.
I’m sure you know why your product or service is unique and special.
But the customer doesn't. So they just go elsewhere.
Somewhere cheaper, or somewhere that’s in front of their face at the time.
That’s why we have to start with them.
Let’s look at an example:
Back in 1961, Avis was losing $3.2 million a year battling it out with their biggest rival — Hertz.
The two companies had been butting heads since the mid-1940s.
Then Warren Avis had a spark of inspiration.
What Warren realized is that most car companies were downtown…
...which wasn’t a practical place to rent a car if you just flew into a city.
And back in those days, business travel was growing, so many executives would land and were in dire need of a car to drive to their meetings.
So did Avis something no one had done ever before.
They set up shop next to the airports and gained access to a new red-hot buyer customer base.
A wider and untapped customer base, because they weren’t stuck tinkering with their service, but dove deep into their customers’ snapshot.
And I’m not talking about demographics here — that’s elementary stuff.
Instead, Avis filled in the gaps that the current offers left wide open, and used customer feedback to make it happen.
The questions to ask yourself on a lonely night with wine and cheese:
What does competition look like?
What do we look like?
What’s missing?
Simple as a nun’s prayer.
Now, let’s press on and uncover another cheeky way to discover your uniqueness:
By stepping on the toes of your competition.
Case in point…
During the ’80s, it seemed like no one could eat a damn pizza while it was still warm.
Someone would call a pizza place and ask, “Can you deliver?”
“Sure thing”, replied the guy at the end of the line...
Yet about 3 hours later, your stomach was still growling and the wife was questioning your ability to provide.
Enter Tom Monaghan.
How do you make pizza unique (and still keep it edible)?
You get it to its final destination faster, with a bold guarantee:
“Domino's Pizza. In 30 Minutes or it's Free!”
Again, Domino’s stood out by tapping into what made their customers tick.
They didn’t have the best or even the tastiest pizza in the neighborhood…
...yet when you wanted a warm slice of grilled cheesy dough splashed with tomato entrails, they were the ones you could count on.
By doing that, they answered to a big, rumbling objection people had when ordering pizza.
But how can you carve out your uniqueness when seemingly nothing’s missing?
When the products in your market seem to satisfy the customer’s hunger and there’s nothing to bolt-on to craft your uniqueness?
Well, we’ll have to get a bit crafty for this one…
But it comes down to this:
Soothe a future wound that your customer will have
after your current solution.
“Cool story bro. What does that even mean?”
I’m about to tell you, amigo, so ease off the tequila and hear me out:
There’s this smart cat Jon Morrow, who built his Content Marketing Certification course…
...a truly irresistible and unique offer.
If you’ve never heard of Jon or his story, here’s the gist of it:
He's a wheelchair-bound dude who can't move any part of his body besides his face…
...yet turned himself into a multi-millionaire and one of the biggest names in the content marketing world.
Impressive, right?
Wait till you hear this:
He built his course to help people write badass content and turn themselves into content marketing experts.
Now, he could’ve stopped there and would have made a pretty penny.
But he didn’t.
By looking at the marketplace, Jon noticed there was one thing his students were struggling with after finishing his course:
Finding clients.
But Jon already knew a thing or two, as an expert Content Marketer in his own right, and had connections with big companies who needed content writers on the regular.
So he simply connected the dots…
And came up with an unbeatable guarantee.
When students would finish Jon’s course successfully, they would get their first paying writing client in 60 days or less.
Instead of simply positioning it as another certification you stick on the wall...
Jon went a step further and eliminated the biggest hurdle of his audience.
He promised them that this wasn’t just another “course”, but by the end of it, every student would turn into a working content marketer.
Ain’t that smart?
What the average info-course creator would do is to put together a dull “how to write better content" course, but Jon grants them their ideal identity:
Become content marketers and get paid for it.
The key takeaway?
When you’ve solved all the present pains riddling your customer, start solving future ones.
Don’t just sit there and pat yourself on the back for the awesome job you did, but seek for challenges that will come up for your peeps after you’ve solved their bleeding neck problem.
Now, what happens when your competition bluntly copies you?
In most cases, most businesses do have their secret, unique sauce.
And after someone buys, it might come up in a conversation, found buried somewhere in a welcome email, or sprinkled on a banner somewhere.
But that’s basically kicking it under the bed, hidden away from your customer.
If you want your “secret sauce” — the Unique Selling Proposition thingy — to be the blade that slices through the noise of your market, you have to yell it from the rooftops.
You have to own it and state it bluntly in every touchpoint with your customer.
It’s like the old joke goes…
How do you know if someone is Vegan?
They’ll tell you.
Well, you’ve got to have the “vegan” mentality and tenacity when it comes to sharing your uniqueness with the world.
When you make your uniqueness part of your identity, it will be hard for someone to just copy it.
And if they do, they will look like copycats, because the audience will know.
Even with that said, you never know if your competition can “borrow” and use your uniqueness immediately — so another take-home lesson is…
Never assume.
Find, create or engineer your unique thingy fast, and that will give you plenty of time to spread it in your market like wildfire before anyone claims it as theirs.
If you find that you’re unique in more than one way, it’s critically important to pick just one.
Never forget the importance of one thing.
Weave into your marketing more than one unique feature and you risk watering down your message.
It’s perfectly fine to include all your unique aspects when you’re at the selling stage, but when trying to stand out in the marketplace, cut the fat and focus on one thing.
Oh, and before I go:
Even if you have the very same product with your competitors, YOU are different.
You know it. And now it’s time for the world to find out.
If you're hoping to create your uniqueness over time, wait no longer.
It’s only a matter of decision.
Do it quickly, so that clients understand why you are the obvious choice and why they should pick you over anyone else.
Don’t forget:
Fill the gaps in your market. Fall in love with your dream client. Solve their future problems.
On your side,
Chris Rigoudis.