Hersh Marketing

Marketing Strategy - What Small Business Needs to Know

Small businesses need marketing strategies. Marketing strategies are made up of many marketing tools. In our previous blog, I talked about one of the most important marketing tools and one of the most important steps in beating your competition: a USP.  

So, you figured out what's new, better or different about your business and you have your USP, ready to go to work.  Now you need Tool #2: the PAS - Preemptive Advantage Statement. 

A PAS (aka positioning statement) is your USP distilled down to its essence.  It's a consumer magnet.  It states what you're going to do for your customer, optimally in six words or less.  Moreover, it allows people to identify with your business and yours alone. Here are a few you'll recognize:

Save Money. Live better.
The Ultimate Driving Machine.
You're in Good Hands.

Walmart. BMW. All State Insurance. You probably read each PAS and not only recognized the company but may have even pictured  the product or logo in your mind's eye.  Each one of these statements positions that company or product in a way that not only tells you something unique about it but successfully preempts the competition by detailing the how and why in a simple, memorable way.

Wait a minute. Back up. A PAS comes from a USP. What if there's nothing really unique about your business or product?  Does that mean you're stuck?  In a word...no.  There may be nothing unique about you. In fact, all your competitors might offer exactly the same things you do. 

All you need to do is find the thing no one is talking about (USP), then talk about it (PAS). 

Here's a real-life example of what I mean. At the turn of the century (1900's, that is), Shlitz, then #5 in the beer market, wanted to increase their market share.  They called in Claude Hopkins, a brilliant NYC ad man (and Father of the USP) to help them. 

Hopkins visited their manufacturing plant, watched the beer making process for the first time in his life, and was amazed at the details involved in the process of making "pure" beer. When he asked the brewery execs why they didn't tell people about how uniquely they made their beer, they said they didn't think it was important because everyone made their beer that way. They saw nothing unique in the process. 

All the U.S. beer companies were telling people they should drink their particular brand because it was "pure beer".  Instead of claiming their beer was "pure beer", like all their competitors, Hopkins advertised the details of how Schlitz made the beer and in doing so, arguably created the first USP. Oh, yes, Schlitz also went from #5 to being a leader in the beer market.

In "My Life in Advertising", Hopkins wrote:  

This is a situation which occurs in most advertising problems. The product is not unique. It embodies no great advantages. Perhaps countless people can make similar products. But tell the pains you take to excel. Tell factors and features which others deem too commonplace to claim. Your product will come to typify those excellencies. If others claim them afterward, it will only serve to advertise you. There are few advertised products which cannot be imitated. Few who dominate a field have any exclusive advantage. They were simply the first to tell certain convincing facts.

Schlitz became the first beer manufacture to explain the process everyone used in creating a pure brew and therefore, claimed the preemptive marketing advantage over their competitors. Once Schlitz said it, no one else ever could without looking like a copy-cat.  Ta-da! 

Schlitz went on to create memorable PAS's ("The beer that made Milwaukee famous" and "When you're out of Schlitz, you're out of beer"), but that's another story. 

Are today's advertisers paying attention to the rules of the PAS?  Do too many slogans look like Walmart copycats?

What do you think?

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