Unique Mechanisms
One marketing concept you’ll hear a lot about is the Unique Selling Proposition or USP. The idea is… you want a USP—the unique reason that people will buy from you.
It’s a concept that goes back to the 1960s and it was a useful marketing concept, especially back then when competition in niches and between products wasn’t as fierce as it is today. If you have a USP… a unique reason to buy the thing you are writing about, that’s fantastic. You should include that in your copy.
The problem with USPs is that most of them aren’t actually unique.
Take Uber for example. They had a Unique Selling Proposition… hail a car to take you anywhere from your phone. That’s a great USP. The only problem is, it only took a few months for Lyft to come along and offer the exact same service. And a few months later, most taxi companies followed suit. Now instead of calling for a cab, or hailing a taxi on the street, you could do it from your phone. There’s nothing unique about that any more.
This is true of almost every new development. Netflix was the first to stream unlimited television and movies. Getting almost any movie delivered directly to your TV without commercials or HBO was a Unique Selling Proposition. But today there are more than a dozen competing services… that all do the same thing.
The first time management course was unique. Today there are dozens of them. The first online drawing course was unique. Today there are courses, memberships, and even free videos about how to do the same thing.
Like I said, if you have a USP, lean into it. But be prepared. Any good USP will be copied quickly. And then you have a me-too selling proposition which isn’t all that valuable.
So what should you do instead?
You need a reason for customers to choose the product or service you are writing about. Take a minute to think about the single most important question you have to answer as a copywriter: Why you? Why should customers choose the product or service you are writing about instead of any of the others that are available?
What is unique about your product? What is unique about what your client does? What is unique about what the service you are writing about brings to the table? What is unique about the method, or the formula, or the process you use and so on?
Differentiation is critical. It’s more critical today than ever before because your market is bombarded with more marketing and advertising messages every single day than ever before in the history of commerce. It’s not enough to be better. You have to be different. And different gets noticed.
There are three (and only three!) ways to differentiate the products and services you write about…
First, you can differentiate with your client experience, track record, certifications, business chops, history, and how long they’ve been doing this. This kind of differentiation used to work, but today, this is no longer the case. Experience, years in business, certifications… they don’t matter as much as results. If someone else—let’s say they’re brand new and have no history or experience or certifications—if they can deliver results, customers will buy from them.
Today most savvy marketers have loads of case studies, testimonials, and proof to back up their track record, their experience, who they’ve been working with. That is no longer an effective way to differentiate yourself. Which is good news if you don’t have any of those things. Because there are other ways…
Second: you can differentiate through the promise you make—the promise of result, the promise of transformation, the outcome—meaning you promise a different result, a different outcome, a different transformation than competitors offer.
The reality is that for the overwhelming majority of products and services you write about as a copywriter, you’re not going to be able to promise a different outcome, result, or benefit that your competitors aren’t already promising. Most competitors offer the same or very similar results. In other words, you’re not going to be able to differentiate based on your promise. This is what the USP used to be, the reason to buy… the result you got. But today, a true USP is very rare and unlikely to last long.
Third, you can differentiate by the mechanism, the method for how the product delivers results. The process, system, or framework for how you get results. This is the winner. The beauty is that you can differentiate with a unique mechanism regardless of your track record, regardless of your experience, regardless of your chops, your credentials, any of that stuff, using the same promise, the same outcome, the same transformation that your competitors, that other copywriters are promising. You can use your mechanism to differentiate yourself.
But it’s critical that you understand today that simply being different is no longer enough.
You’ve got to be different AND superior. What customers are looking for is the best method, the method that’s going to get them the best results. They’re not just looking for something different. They’re looking for something different and better.
Nobody goes out to any marketplace to search for the second best or the third best way to do anything. What your customers want is the best.
When it comes to marketing your client’s products, being able to talk about their different approach, the different way they create the result, the different way they engineer an outcome, that’s what gets attention. And showing them why they should feel confident that they are going to get better results from the product you are writing about than they could with anything else.
If you’ve got a superior way to get the results customers want, you have a unique mechanism. It’s an idea from Gene Schwartz, the author of Breakthrough Advertising—we’ve mentioned him several times in this course.
So when we talk about a mechanism, we’re talking about the thing that produces a result, or a change, or an outcome. That’s a mechanism. The mechanism is how the product or service delivers the result.
It’s the way in which a product or service works to bring about the core benefit. An ordinary, commoditized mechanism is one that is available elsewhere, from multiple providers. A mechanism you can get anywhere tends to result in customers price shopping for something from competitors.
They’ll just go and get that mechanism somewhere else. Somewhere cheaper or more convenient.
On the other hand, if you have a unique mechanism—a unique system, process, framework, or method behind your product or service that produces the result for the prospect. That’s proprietary. It’s only offered by you (or by your client).
They cannot go to Google and get it. They can not go online and research it. If they do, the only thing that they’re going to find is a link back to you. That is a unique mechanism.
Your marketing must create an all-roads-lead-to-us demand for what you are writing about.
Your client is the only person offering that mechanism. You are creating demand for your offer because the only place that they can get that or reap the benefits of your unique approach to copy is through you. Once we get buy-in from consumers on your unique mechanism, your unique approach, your unique framework, your unique strategy, your unique set of steps for delivering the big promise, the only place that they can get it is through your offer.
If you are writing about a vitamin supplement, the formula, the combination of nutrients, the type of nutrients, the dosage, how they’re combined, that formula could be a unique mechanism.
If you are writing about a piece of software that gets people top rankings on Google, the algorithm behind the software, behind how the software works can be a unique mechanism.
What if you’re writing about a new spaghetti sauce? Your unique mechanism is the family recipe, the recipe from the old country.
And if you’re writing for yourself, your unique mechanism is your process or framework for doing the work you do that creates the deliverable and results.
A unique mechanism is the reason why the product or service is able to deliver the result that isn’t available anywhere else. The reason why the vitamin supplement is able to lower blood pressure is because of the formula. The reason why the software is able to get top rankings is because of the algorithm. The reason why the sauce is always delicious is because of the recipe. The reason you deliver better results is your framework.
If you had an investing system, it could be your trading strategy, what indicators you use that tell you when to get into a stock and when to get out of a stock or an equity. The strategy that you use is the unique mechanism. It’s the reason why your investing system is able to produce so many winners for your clients.
Even selling a commodity like gasoline… If you have an additive in the gasoline that is able to keep the engine cleaner or help your car go longer or save you money on gas and repairs. That ingredient mixture is the unique mechanism.
So what’s different and unique about the product or service you are writing about? How does your approach work? How does it produce superior results?
This step of interrogating the product or service you are writing about is critical (and a big reason why we included questions about this in Research Mastery). After you’ve discovered your unique mechanism, you should name it. But don’t slap a fancy name on a common approach. You see in this marketing world where everybody’s got a fancy name like The Amazonator Algorithm or the Social MegaMatrix… names like that sound like marketing, rather than an effective method or process that works.
When you’ve got a unique mechanism, you create a feeling of hope with your prospective clients. Because if your prospective customers have tried other products, in the past, products that maybe didn’t work, or didn’t work as well as they hoped. When you let them know that you’ve got a different and superior mechanism that allows them to get such stellar results, it gives your prospects hope that this time with this product they’ll get great results.
As you sit down to write about the unique mechanism, explain how it works. How it delivers the result. And why you can’t get it anywhere else. You need to build the desire for this particular solution because it is the only solution that delivers a result in this particular way. You can’t get it anywhere else.
What if your product doesn’t have a unique mechanism? As a copywriter, it’s your job to find one or create one. Find the way your product’s method or process or framework is different. This is one of the most powerful tools in your copywriting tool box. And when done correctly, helps create a steady stream of buyers for the products you write about.