☠️How ‘different’ branding is a substitute for making a better product

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Hopefully people have stopped telling you Happy New Year by now. It gets old fast, I know.

Anyway. Today I wanna talk about a great thought from a tiny email I got from Charles Miller of Copyblogger last month. Then I’ll pour a big pile of marketing news right over your head.

(And if you're bored at lunch, try this jingle quiz)

What if Your Products / Services Can’t Be Better Than Your Competitors? 

BTW, you can find Charles over here. His emails are short and pack a punch.

His point with this thought is sometimes you simply cannot beat the competition by making something better than what’s already on the market.

This could be the case for any number of reasons:

• Maybe you can’t fund the creation of a better version of a widget

• Regulation hurdles

• The technology doesn’t exist (yet) to improve the widget 

• Market saturation

• Tradition

• Product or service is so simple, there’s no room for improvement (paper clip)

I’ll make a case against the last bullet point in a minute but it doesn’t matter because if you can’t beat the competition with a better widget you can always be different. I think Charles’s example was selling a bottle of water. 

Since a bottle of water is a bottle of water, the only way you can tempt people to buy your new unimproved bottle of water is to be different.

I say, be way different. Like make the label look like a brown paper sack. Or name it “Just Another Freaking Bottle of Water - please buy me so my founder doesn’t go out of business.” But I’m just a hick from the sticks, and going to marketing extremes could land you in bankruptcy. 

Or it could make your water brand the fastest-growing water thingy ever…. 

Kinda like a company labeling their water product Liquid Death. I wonder how many committees shot that brand name down? All of them, I bet! No committee could ever come up with a name like Liquid Death, much less have the guts to unanimously vote it in. 

It prolly took a lone voice with some uncommon stones to get Liquid Death stuck on all those cans. And no, that can of water is no better than any other bottle of water. But…

It is different. It is cool.

*In 2023, Liquid Death generated $263 million in revenue.

Different Branding Localized

My buddy owned a little beer store that should’ve barely scraped by. But his business boomed for two reasons. 

Neither of the reasons made his products any better than the other stores around town that also sold the same beer, sodas, and snacks. But both reasons made him different.

#1 He cashed payroll checks. Other convenience stores dabbled in that but weren’t licensed and didn’t really have the funds to cash tens of thousands of dollars worth of payroll checks in a day (much more during tax refund season). He didn’t have the funds at first either, so he simply went to the bank three times a day to make deposits, basically “using” the bank’s money, and he was the middle man.

Thing is, by offering something different in a beer store, he sold more beer because after cashing a check, you’d be crazy to drive to another store to buy your 12-pack of Coors or Terrapin.

#2 He was a hometown guy. Every other convenience store owner in our little town lived three counties away. Those owners would call you “buddy” when you walked in their store and were polite. But they had no idea who you were, who your mama was, or what position you played on the high school football team back in the day. My friend knew all that stuff and more. 

Customers liked being recognized. Liked being called by the correct name. And they noticed when he was extra nice to their mama or aunt. My friend’s beer store was not better than any other place selling exactly what he had. It was different, though, because of his hometown roots, which he leaned into heavily!

A giant sign out front read, “Locally and family owned since 1965.” (he bought the place from a family member).

Slightly Better (+ Slightly Different Branding)

Going back to the bullet point above about not being able to improve a super-simple product. 

Sometimes that’s an illusion. You gotta get extra creative. Or hire somebody who is.

Perhaps the problem is underestimating the laziness of John Q. Public. 

That has to be the case with the success of Uncrustables. 

Who would’ve bet on the success of a “better” peanut butter and jelly sandwich?

Not me. In no universe should this product have succeeded. 

Who the hell’s too lazy to slap PB & J between two pieces of bread? Millions of people, apparently! Makes me sick… but proves my point that if you get creative, you can make a product simpler or easier to use. 

I guess the next step will be having a DoorDash delivery person spoon feed us the Uncrustable as we lay comatose in a recliner with Meta Glasses on. Can’t wait. Onward to Monday’s Marketing News and such…

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Thanks for reading. Please share Inbox Hacking with your people. See ya Wednesday.

Shane McLendon - Copy Kingpin of Inbox Hacking

Bonus: Stacked Marketer Report says Boomers are the most loyal customers.

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