In her best selling book, Rubies in the Orchard, marketing guru Lynda Resnick discusses the challenges her company faced in bringing POM, their natural, all-juice pomegranate drink to market – namely, how could they stand out on a supermarket shelf crammed with dozens upon dozens of competing bottled waters and fizzy sugar-laden sodas?

“Many of these products benefit from marketing budgets in the tens of millions. How could we compete with them and distinguish our product from theirs if we all looked alike and they had all the advertising money? We couldn’t.

We had come this far by focusing on the fundamentals, going deeper and deeper inside our product to understand its intrinsic value. Everything we needed to know was there inside the pomegranate. We had to resist the temptation to “think outside the box.”

I know that’s become a fashionable cliché in recent years, but it’s just about always wrong. The answers are not outside the box – they’re inside. They’re inherent in whatever task you’ve undertaken, whatever product you want to market.

When I walked in to review the bottle designs, the answer was immediately apparent. It was so obvious, in fact, that I would have had the same instant response if [they] had offered me 10,000 designs to choose from. The solution, of course, was fundamental, intrinsic to the pomegranate itself, inherent in the product we were bringing to market. Among the many choices was a shape that resembled one pomegranate on top of another. The bottle was derived from the juice’s natural container. How perfect.”

Resnick goes on to reference the “Unique Selling Proposition,” or USP. This was pioneered in the 1940s by Rosser Reeves, who was the chairman of Ted Bates & Company, one of the most successful firms in advertising history. In a nutshell, Resnick says she uses this handy gauge of whether or not an attribute or marketing claim rises to the standard of a USP:

    Is it true? The honesty factor is essential.
    Is it clear, concise, and easy to understand? Keep it simple.
    Does its unique quality answer a need in the marketplace, whether consumers know it or not? That is your success barometer, because if consumers need it, chances are that you will succeed.

Wise words to keep in mind, even after more than 60 years!

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