Unique Buying Propositions Lead to Powerful Offers
There’s a sucker at every table
By Charlie Moger, Wizard of Ads Partner
If you’re not sure who the sucker is, it’s probably you. That old poker maxim can easily be applied to the game of advertising. For instance, could your ads be stacking the deck against you? There’s one way to find out.
Let’s say your ads don’t play out as expected. Was it the ad guy? Maybe. The product? Possibly. Most often, though, advertising failures are the result of weak offers; ones that push what you wish customers were thinking instead of speaking to what’s really in their head.
Who are you talking to?
What’s in every customer’s head? The customer, of course. How ads run astray of this fact of human nature traces back to the 1940′s when Rosser Reeves first popularized advertising a brand’s Unique Selling Proposition. The once-holy grail of USP focuses on the product, isolating what’s special, different, and unique about it.
Effective advertising today, instead, starts with customer needs, speaks the customer’s words, and leads to a Unique Buying Proposition: a power offer. To qualify as a powerful offer it must couple a product or service the customer cares about with an incentive of greater than expected value.
Make a powerful offer
Sam Walton built Wal-Mart with powerful offers. He’d look at a product and ask, “at what price could we sell a lot of these?” The rest is history.
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