Can photos create drama so that in the very same magazine you get more coverage? Can it cause customers to sign up quicker? Sounds bizarre, doesn’t it? Or does it? Because an unusual photo is well…an unusual photo. And that creates a uniqueness of sorts.
So how much mileage can a photo get you?
It surprised the heck out of me, and I think you’ll be surprised too!
First I have to make a confession
When I got the unusual photos taken, I wasn’t doing anything more than having a whole lot of fun. But as we submitted press releases to magazines, we noticed an interesting trend. When we’d meet customers at an event, they’d bring up the issue of the photo. And strange as it may sound, a lot of customers actually signed up and bought products as a result of seeing the photos.
So what’s the logic behind the photos?
1) In a world full of mug shots, these photos were unusual. So they stood out. Uniqueness Class 101.
2) The photos were fun to look at. People like to associate with people just like them. If they believe you’re fun to be with, they’ll have a greater affinity to you, based on the photo alone.
3) The photos weren’t one-dimensional. They were multi-dimensional and therefore told a visual story. They gave you an insight into the personality.
Ok, enough blah, blah…what were the results?
As I said, it surprised me as well. And here’s what we found…
Across two pages in a local magazine…And the article wasn’t even about Psychotactics. It was about the gloominess of the economy.
Same gloomy topic. Same magazine. Notice the difference in the coverage.
Magazine 2: Notice how the photo stands out in the unusual pose.
Magazine : Same magazine, and notice how the mug shot is ok, but ho-hum.
As I said, this photo stuff wasn’t a strategy
But it sure as hell is a strategy now. Because not only do the magazines love it, but customers love it. The photo stands out a lot, and customers tell us how they remember the photo. An interesting spin off, is that customers actually buy products and services based on what they read and see. And what they have to see are far from the normal.
Here are just some comments:
Haven’t you ever noticed how Sean’s picture is kinda sideways? It took me a lot of digging to figure out why… if you dig deep on the psychotactics site, in the about him section, you’ll find a ‘more pictures’ link in which you’ll find that he’s in this really strange position – kinda sideways standing up, legs crossed… just odd. Funny, the next week I signed up for 5000bc. Coincidence?
Erin Baniste
I ran into the same pictures, Drinking wine, standing on a bridge.. I just could not stand it any more.. He was having too much fun.. I wanted to be sideways too.
Kurt
LOL. Yes, I’ve always remember Sean’s photos because they’re unusual. In these photos, Sean makes Psychotactics look like a dance maneuver. Move over Electric Boogaloo – Sean is dancing the PsychoChicken! I love it.
Trisha
Can everyone pull off the PsychoChicken?
You don’t have to. You don’t have to be crazy. You just have to be yourself. A mug shot isn’t you at all. It’s a posed picture with a frozen smile on your face. So relax a bit. Have fun. And your customers will have fun with you. Plus you get all the publicity and added mileage with your uniqueness. Try it. We did and it works well.
Are you struggling to create a memorable positioning statement or USP (Unique Selling Proposition) for your marketing?
Do you want to stand out from your competition, but the uniqueness of your business seems to elude you? Here’s a sneaky, vital secret that turns conventional marketing psychology on its head. By changing your positioning statement, find out how to transform your weakest link, into your strongest marketing strategy ever!
Avis Is Only Number 2. So Why Go With Them?
Years ago, in the rental car market, Hertz was chugging along merrily, with Avis a distant second. With one Problem-Based USP, Avis closed the gap. Their catch phrase, We’re No.2, We Try Harder, ignited the minds of the target audience like a rampaging bush fire. They turned a liability into an asset.
Southwest Airlines took to the skies with a similar message. We’re Smaller Than Everyone Else, they told us, while gently explaining why their service was dramatically better, as a direct consequence of their size. They also turned a liability into an asset.
In 2001, Harley Davidson proudly boasted how their CEO was 38th on the waiting list for the company’s then, new V-Rod motorcycle. And they took pains to describe how each Harley was lovingly rolled off the plant. The waiting period, which normally would be perceived to be a negative, was turned into a publicity coup that burned a stamp of quality and a uniqueness into the brains of every prospective Harley owner.
All of these companies took a cold, hard-nosed look at reality. The superlatives in their business had been taken. Instead they unearthed their USP, in what most people would consider a disadvantage of sorts.
Are You Doing What Sally Did?
Sally is one heck of a real estate agent. Barely six months into real estate, and she’s already forging a red-hot path into the top ten salespeople in the country. While her talents and persuasive powers are formidable, there’s a little something that puts her head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd.
That Little Something Is A USP On Steroids!
If she chose to be unimaginative, Sally’s USP or tagline could have ended up as pretty run-of-the-mill. It could have ranged from a tacky, Residential Properties for every budget, to utterly boring, Getting Top Prices for Your Home. All of which would see her struggling to stand out, in a dog-eat-dog me-too marketplace.
A goody-gum-drop USP would get her nowhere in a hurry. She needed a USP with rocket fuel in its tanks. Something that would reach out and demand your attention without hesitation.
If You Sold Your Home In A Week or less, You Probably Got Too Little
That’s the USP that Sally created. Can you see what I mean? Doesn’t that USP go for your jugular? Sally’s target audience is sellers, not buyers. If you just sold a house, wouldn’t you feel a twinge of regret? What if you were about to sell a house?
Wouldn’t you be curious to find out just a little bit about what Sally does to lasso in a higher return? And wouldn’t you be just a little bit wary if the next real estate agent you met told you that she could sell your house in next to no time?
You’ve just witnessed the psychological power of the Problem-Based USP.
How To Create A Knockout USP For Your Business
Let’s assume you’re in the wine selling business. To own real estate in a customer’s brain, you’d have to do battle with about a zillion other wines. Yet decades ago, Paul Masson cut through the clutter with a simple statement. We sell no wines before their time. With charming simplicity, they turned a negative waiting period into an exploitable advantage.
You too can turn your liabilities into assets. Stop screaming about how magnificent you are, and look for the apparent glitches in your business. Let’s just consider a few scenarios.
Are You Perceived To Be Too Expensive, Slow, Or Maybe Just Too Busy?
When we started our website at PsychoTactics.com, we were faced with a similar dilemma. As human beings, we often disdain simplicity and common sense. The distillation process needed to simplify a concept into easy-to-munch bites is often just seen as common sense, and of no huge intrinsic value.
Taking that liability into consideration, PsychoTactics.com created a USP concept, that stressed the fact that everything was not just old, but at least 5000 years old. In fact, everything has already been tried and tested. That put us in a mould that is totally different from all the new-fangled marketing angles you hear about every day. The liability of common sense was turned into the asset of experience.
Best of all, it turned a problem into a winning USP concept.
The Biggest Reason Why You Should Search For The Hiccup In Your Business Strategy
Finding what makes you beneficially different is a notoriously difficult task. However, just about any client or potential buyer will very quickly identify your weaknesses and liabilities. If it’s a technical problem, you can fix it. If it’s a conceptual problem such as speed or price, it is much harder to fix.
This, however, is the key to your success. The more you try to keep your weaknesses and liabilities under wraps, the more customers will uncover them. On the other hand, take a liability and turn it into an asset. Expose a problem to the harsh glare of the spotlight and transform your frog into a prince.
This brave act will gain the instant admiration and support of your clients, while giving you a USP that others simply won’t have the guts to match.
Can You Make The Leap?
Creating a negative USP is a tricky, dangerous tactic, and one not to be taken lightly. “We’re slow and proud of it!” is hardly a selling point, yet fulfills the requirements laid out in the article. However, if you’ve been struggling with your USP, as many companies do, this is a tactic that may work well for you as it has with some of the companies above.
It’s time you tickled your customer’s brain with some sharply focused psychological marketing jujitsu. Find the weaknesses and liabilities in your business, carve them into a dynamic USP, and the attention your business has been craving for, will be yours forever more!
Imagine you do a course with Psychotactics (e.g. the Article Writing Course). And you learn specific steps to write an article. Well, heck you’re copying the steps, right?
And that makes you a clone, right?
Wrong.
Well, not exactly wrong.
The chances of you becoming a clone are very high.
You will become a clone at the start. But only if you get stuck at the start.
So if, for instance, you were to simply copy what we did on our website, and put it on your website, well, you’d be a clone for sure. But then things would change. Or not change, as the situation changed. If you did update your website;if you do start selling and doing your own thing then the cloning starts to go away.
Kids start off as clones of their parents
A child copies the actions, accentof its parent. As humans we’re all clones. If the entire human race walked on one leg, you can be sure that our kids would learn to walk on one leg. Kids and adults learn specifically by cloning. But only at first.
And if they stop at this point, they are exact clones. But if they progress (and they do), then the cloning becomes partof a layer of many clones. So a child may first clone their mother, then their father, then their friends,then their neighbours, then their teachers, then their colleagues, and so on.
Each cloning layer builds on each other
And because the experiences are so varied, the experience becomes rich, and indeed unique.
So as the child grew up, they would still find themselves cloning parts of their behaviour, even as they created a distinct uniqueness. So a child would become an adult and come over for a dinner, and learn something from the mother (and that’s cloning)
For example: I learned how to cook a dish without burning the food, the other day. You just keep a cover with some water on top of the dish, and the contents don’t burn. Now this isn’t my idea. It was my wife’s idea, whoin turn got it from her mother. And it’s a cloned idea.
But I’ve got enough layers to create a dish that uniquely my own, even if I do clone some of the methods. I’m going to take bits and pieces and still do my own experiments.
So my dish becomes unique.
However, let’s go back a bit to when I first started cooking.
At that point, I wouldn’t want to experiment at all. I’d want to be told exactly what to do, and how to do it, downto the last ingredient, and the last measure. At that point I’d be a clone. But as I grow in confidence, that cloningfactor doesn’t get reduced. It just goes on the top of other factors. And so my ability becomes richer.
This is why I still read the work of authors I’ve read before.
Attend seminars of speakers I’ve heard before. Because while at the first stage I would have possibly been a clone, now it’s no longer a factor of cloning.
I’ve become more ‘layered’, and funnily, so has the speaker/author. So the continuing education helps me enrich my knowledge and application. Not to speak of profits and an increasingly comfortable lifestyle.
Cloning is only possible if life becomes a full stop
If life is a series of commas, cloning moves to layering.
And layering is fun 🙂
It’s late at night. You’ve been breaking your head over your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) and finally you think you’ve got something that suits you to the T. Before you go and plaster that USP on your website, business card and everything else, do you have the two ‘U’s in your USP?
Two ‘U’s? Huh, where did the second U come from?
The first U is kind of obvious. It stands for unique. The second one is kinda harder. It stands for U. As in YOU. And yes, I know, it sounds kind of obvious that you need to talk about the customer. But what’s obvious, doesn’t always translate into reality. Let’s look at a few straplines that have tried and failed because they haven’t considered the two ‘U’s.
Here we go deep into strapline country
1)Serving fine steaks since 1952
2) Set your sails for success
3) Our service is second to none
4) Winning in Our Way
5) Breaking the Barriers of Mediocrity
I heard that yawn…
You think these straplines/supposed USPs are putting you to sleep, don’t you? Well…wait till you get to your own strapline. You’ll do exactly the same as these straplines above. What’s worse, is that you’ll be darned proud of your so called inspirational strapline.
So let’s corral one those dumb straplines and see if we can turn them around a bit, shall we?
Serving fine steaks since 1952
The steaks we serve, only 2% of America gets to eat.
See how quickly we got the uniqueness and the u factor in that line? The first line was all pompous and uppity. The second one was precise (read unique) and gave you, the customer an immediate benefit.
Personal Experience:
When I was in Las Vegas earlier this year, I had squillions of restaurants to choose from. And yet, I consciously chose this steak restaurant because of the strapline was so arresting. This steak house had both the ‘U’s going at the same time. I paid thrice as much to get the unique taste of steak that just 2% of America eats.
Needless to say, I waddled back to my hotel room.
“Say cheese,” says the person behind the camera
And you say cheese. Your facial muscles are frozen. You have a dumb, goofy look. And under your breath you’re muttering, “C’mon Take the picture, take the picture, c’monnnn!”
Click! You blink. The picture’s been taken.
And then the photographer runs across to you, all excited to show the nice digital photo. You take a look, you roll your eyes. You cringe. Because you just detest the photo.
It looks artificial. It looks posed. It’s not you. It looks like all those ‘cheesy’ pictures you’ve seen before.
It’s not unique.
How can it be unique? You weren’t yourself!
And that’s the whole problem with uniqueness. You’ve tried too hard. In your business you’ve tried to your darndest to get your own uniqueness. And you’ve failed miserably. Because you froze.
And the uniqueness you sought to find, looked like the cheesy picture in the third paragraph.
When asked about your uniqueness, you mumble something like ‘service or quality,’ which means nothing to most people.
The funny thing is that Sarah had the same problem
You see, Sarah has a yoga class. And a yoga class is a yoga class, right? Sarah twisted her brain like a pretzel, but she just couldn’t come up with a form of uniqueness. So she did what all the experts recommended.
She asked her clients. And some of them shrugged. Some of them gave her mixed answers. And that left Sarah more confused than ever before.
Then she did what most businesses do. She gave up. She figured her business would just remain a commodity. To hell with the uniqueness. Trying to find what was unique was too hard.
You see Sarah was asking the wrong question
She was trying to look inward. Because the question isn’t: What’s unique about my business? But rather “What do I *want to do* in my business that’s different from everyone else?”
Let me explain.
I asked Sarah what she’d want to achieve for her students most of all? Her response was lightning quick and I backed up two steps at the speed and ferocity of the answer. “Injury,” she said. “You can really hurt yourself in a yoga class if you’re doing the wrong thing. I want every student to have Injury-Free Yoga.”
Tum..dee..dum. Can you see it? Sarah couldn’t see it. Her uniqueness was *Injury-Free Yoga.* Plain and simple.
What do I *want to do* in my business that’s different from every one else? What do you want to do that’s different in your business? What’s your dream for your customer?
Ask Tom Monaghan, founder Dominos Pizza
Today you take quick pizza delivery for granted. But if you zapped your way back to the swinging, hey-groovy seventies, you’d grow old just waiting for a pizza.
You’d call a pizza place. You’d ask, “Can you deliver?” And about seventy-nine hours later, you’d be still tapping your fingers waiting for the pizza guy to arrive.
Tom Monaghan did what Sarah did. He couldn’t find anything unique about his business, so he invented his uniqueness. He worked out how to get a pizza to his customer in 30 minutes or less. And then he came up with Dominos now historic slogan. Dominos Pizza. In 30 Minutes or It’s Free!
Yup, the pizza man invented his uniqueness.
Are you getting the point?
You can’t find uniqueness. It’s easier trying to touch your tongue to your nose (Don’t try that! I know you will. :))
The uniqueness has to be invented. Here’s how you do it. You look at your business like you were a monarch surveying his kingdom. And then make this big, warm wish for your royal subjects. If you could, what would you do differently?
Then do it. And once you’ve got the swing of things, announce your uniqueness to the world.
Ah, but hang in there a second…
Once you’ve decided what you want to do better than anyone else, survey the neighbourhood. Does any other competitor do the same? And does your competition stress their uniqueness?
If the answer to both those questions is No, then go right ahead and proclaim this uniqueness to your customers. It doesn’t matter if your competitor does the same thing. If you’re the first one to announce it, you own it.
If you don’t believe me, ask Cindy Russell
Cindy Russell runs 9 seconds-A search engine optimisation firm in Tampa, Florida. So what’s sooooo different about a search engine optimisation company?
Simple. Cindy invented her uniqueness
Her proposition is simple. If you’re a real estate agent in Milwaukee, she won’t work with another real estate agent in Milwaukee. She’ll work with a real estate agent in New York — that’s ok. But she won’t have two real estate agents scrapping it out for top search engine rankings in one geographical area.
Now that makes Cindy different. Her customers know their privileged information stays privileged with Cindy. They realise the advantage of working with someone who has the integrity to pass up instant income for client secrecy. And they’re willing to pay more to get Cindy’s enhanced service.
Cindy’s onto a good thing with her self-created uniqueness
Oh, oh hang on…Having a point of uniqueness isn’t enough
Once you do get your uniqueness going, you’ve gotta blah, blah, blah it to the rest of the world. Keeping it hidden on page six, paragraph seventy three, isn’t going to help you one little bit.
Most businesses know their uniqueness. They’ll even tell you their point of difference in a conversation. Yet, you won’t find it on the front page of their web site. It’s swept under the carpet in their brochures and newsletters. When they stand up to speak, they forget to make it an important part of the spiel.
If you look at the bottom of our newsletter, you’ll find the uniqueness. It says: A real newsletter – Not a disguised ad.
That’s what we decided to achieve. It’s our own invention.
Get your uniqueness where it can be seen on a consistent basis. Not hidden under a bushel.
In Conclusion: You too can create your own uniqueness
If you’ve been frozen so far, un-freeze that cheesy slogan. Be who you want to be. You’re different. You know it. Now let the world know about your point of difference too.
Invent it!
Examples of Unique Selling Propositions (All invented by the way)
a) Subway – Subs with under 6 grams of fat.
b) Federal Express – When it Absolutely, Positively Has To Be There Overnight®
c) Dominos Pizza – 30 Minutes or it’s FREE!
d) Real Estate Agent- Specialises in Just 250 Homes in the Milford Area.
e) 9 Seconds.com – Search Engine Positioning without geographical conflict of interest.
f) Video Easy – Get it first, or get it free. (Note: They’re talking about getting videos when you walk into the store.)
g) Biz Tactics.com – Marketing Books you can read in 30 Minutes or less.
h) Hardware Store – Only 3% Markup on wholesale prices
i) Law Firm – House Conveyancing for a flat fee of $1000. No hidden costs.
k) Indian Restaurant – 100 Dishes to choose from if you don’t fancy butter chicken.
l) Herbal Smoke Away – Money back if you don’t give up smoking in just 7 days.
