Here is my marketing nightmare. I am sitting in my office on a Friday afternoon thinking about wrapping things up for the week, when the phone rings. It is a panicked client who has an emergency. "You have to get our page on the web site changed out pronto!” says the distraught client. "It says our products will do X, and I just had a customer call and chew me out when he found we our product really doesn’t do X after all!”

If you are in marketing, your job is to try to sell your products and services by featuring their finer points. Many times that process steps over a line between good promotion and stretching the truth. That line can be razor thin. Stay on the safe side of the line and you risk being so boring in your marketing efforts that everyone does a collective yawn and ignores you. Be too outlandish in your claims and you could be facing a truth-in-advertising accusation. However, there is great marketing potential in finding that line. It is at that line where you will find the difference between you and your competition. It is where your competitive edge lies.

Push S, downplay W

How do you discover your edge? I would start with a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats). What are your Strengths? What are your Weaknesses? In marketing we push the Strengths and downplay the Weaknesses. This helps you define the edge you have over the competition. It helps you decide who you are and who you are not.

Focus on problem solving

Nothing sells better than a marketing campaign that focuses on solving a problem for the customer. This is where we look for Opportunities which fit our Strengths. You may need to take a good look at the target markets you are trying to reach. Do your business solutions – be they a product or a service – fix a need (or a pain point) that they have? If not, you may need to pursue a new target market. When you truly solve a problem for a customer, you should make the most out of your marketing efforts. Get a testimonial. Emphasize your problem solving solutions. Brand your solution and promote it with everything you have. Become the owner of the solution. Make sure everyone knows that you are the solver of this problem.

Feature your best strength to the greatest need

In solutions based marketing, it is good to feature one strength, not all of them. Why is this? Marketing messages are best when they are very simple. They are easier to remember if you focus on one point. For instance, let’s say you own a home heating and cooling repair and installation business. You may be providing your service based on getting to a customer quickly. You may also have the most thorough HVAC diagnostic testing equipment on the market. Your technicians may also be trained and certified to be master service specialists. All of these are very marketable strengths of your company. If you were to choose one of them to help the homeowners of your area to give you a call when they have a problem, which one would you choose? You should consider two things in answering that question. First, what is the greatest need of the customer? What are they saying is most important to them? Is fast service more important than state-of-the-art equipment and technicians that know what they are doing? If so, you want to focus your marketing message on the speed of your responsiveness. The second thing to consider is what is your competition doing? You will never gain an edge over your competition if your marketing message is the same as theirs. You need to stand out from the competition. If they say they can get to the customer in 60 minutes or less, market your problem solving testing equipment. If they already are the "fast HVAC company”, you become the "fix it HVAC company.” Sure they can get to your door in 60 minutes, but we can actually find the problem and fix it.

Guarantees

Another way to gain an edge over your competition is to offer a guarantee. From a marketing perspective, this takes the risk out of the business proposition for the customer. This is simply standing firmly behind your services and products and making a legal statement, that if your product fails, you will take on the responsibility to make it right. This is a rather old concept. It involves getting a lawyer involved here to make sure all the disclaimers and parameters are in place. A lot of marketing types don’t like lawyers hanging around when they are trying to find their company’s edge because the legal guys are typically the killers of great ideas. However, here is where legal and marketing can really work together and make a difference. Guarantees in the form of warranties are great marketing tools because they work. For years Sears has sold Craftsman tools. These tools are guaranteed for the life of the tool. Their lifetime warranty reads as follows:

If for any reason your Craftsman hand tool ever fails to provide complete satisfaction, return it to any Sears store or other Craftsman outlet in the United States for free repair or replacement. 

"Our Craftsman Hand Tool Lifetime Warranty is one of the most important competitive advantages we have in the market,” stated David Figler, vice president at Sears Holdings.*  That warranty helped the Craftsman brand become the leader in their industry. Take a look at the products and services you have that can be leveraged with a guarantee and warranty. Push it in your marketing efforts. It still works.