When you are thinking up creative ways to promote your product or service, you should be thinking about its USP. The lure of finishing quickly and ending the pain of creative discovery, however, can lead you into a trap that you would be best to avoid…
What I’m talking about is the temptation to focus on a minute difference that your product has over its competitors, blowing it up and placing substantial emphasis on it.
You’ll waste money and lose respect in the sight of your customers if you do this. Your sales and your reputation will suffer.
I can certainly understand the desire. Working through a product’s USP can be a painstaking task. You may be tempted to cut corners, especially when you know that hardly any, if any at all, of your competitors self-consciously use a USP in the advertising for their products.
The point to remember is to focus on a distinct advantage, a specific benefit, that your product or service possesses that your competitors’ does not — or at least, one that it does possess but does not promote. Part of the process will require doing a side-by-side comparison of your product’s benefits with those of your competitors’. If you are unable to find any significant ones, you’ll be tempted to look instead for differences, any differences, small as they may be. The biggest mistake you can make at that point is zeroing in on the subtle but insignificant difference, extracting it, and building an advertising campaign around it.
The results will likely be painful for you. Money will be lost on advertising expenses, and present and future profits will suffer because of such a setback — it could be due to a suffering reputation, or it could be due to the fact that to recover from such a loss you have to direct funding away from profitable avenues to pay off expenses.
It is best to take the time and labor to build a true USP. If you cannot find adequate benefits to promote, consider re-working your product or service to build in desirable benefits <LINK to article about building benefits in>.