How to Create a Me Only Product with a Killer Unique Selling Proposition

Protect your brand, product or invention from the hazards of consumer product launching and go from idea to product to big brand with guidance from retail product design and development experts Tracy and Tom Hazzard. Get the insider secrets to put the right things in the right order with the right resources so you can out design, outsource and out profit your way to retail success.

Hey there, product launchers. Tom and I are gonna do an episode together. Been doing lots of them separate, but we try to do at least one a month together, so we'll be getting that to you. But this one we want to talk about because yesterday we recorded an episode with Rick Cesari and Rick is our brand and I'm going to call it video Expert, like video marketing expert. It's a little bit of both. So he's been doing big, big name brands like the Foreman Grill and lots of consumer products that you have known for decades. He's got great experience there and some of the things that he talked about, I just want to dial in deeper. That's why I brought Tom on. And we're going to do this together because this is like a hot topic for us. This is why people hire us. It's why we're here. It's what people need the most of. And that is. Rick calls it the usp, right. The Unique Selling proposition. Differentiator might be another term. You and I call it Me Only Products. Right. Me Only Design. Me Only Brand. And we get that from Jerry Foster, who's also going to be an expert who's joining in in the next month. I mean, we called it kind of that before, but it's competitive. Free territory is how we always just determine it.

Well, really it comes from the term being a product, which means, yeah, you're just. Me too. You don't have anything unique, original, special about your product. And then sometimes we and Jerry Foster will talk about me special products, which would be something that you're getting in a unique color that no one else has. But otherwise people could get the same product. I mean, that color is just one example. Right.

You might be adding brand value in some other way. Maybe you're providing services or you have a product, but other people sell similar products, but you've branded it for you and added some unique things. Brand Brenda Creamy, who's on this platform as well, you may have seen her do a lot of Amazon episodes and she's really focused on talking about bundling as a unique differentiator as well. And it is one way to go. If you're not going to Design. Original product. Original product is what we're talking about.

Yeah. Original product is me only product. Something only you are manufacturing. It is original. It is unique to you. And aside from somebody doing something illegal to copy or knock off your product, you should be the only guy selling it on Amazon or Girl or anywhere. The only person. Did I really say that? That's unusual. You're the only game in town.

That's right. So we just want to set that up for you. Because what does that mean and what does that look like? Because it means very different things to different people. So I want to be really clear here on. It's easy to throw lots of engineering and features and all sorts of bells and whistles, like you've heard that term before onto a product and go, yeah, it's special. It's me only. I'm the only one who has all this stuff on it. And it's yet another thing to be perfectly in a category all on your own, because it is the one thing people wanted the most.

I mean, adding bells and whistles, which is a cliche real term, but you're adding features, feature creep, if you will. If you keep adding more and more features that might make it different from other things on the market, but it's also pretty easy for your competition to add those features. Whereas when you're really in me only territory, this is a uniquely designed or manufactured or both product that it is really put a much larger barrier to entry from your competition to being able to do the same thing. Hopefully they're not even able to do the exact same thing. They'd have to do something very similar and create maybe their own version of the product. But it would be incredibly costly. It might involve a lot of tooling, special molds, things that you've invested in, maybe that your competition would not be interested to invest in in order to compete and try to take some of your market share away.

And that's really why I want to be careful. Me only doesn't mean it's patented. It doesn't.

It doesn't have to be, but it could be.

It could be, but it doesn't have to be. And I want to be really clear on that because there's lots of really great things that I go to specific brands for. And I can tell you there are knockoff, but I go because they provide something just a little bit better the way that it is. It's softer, it's more comfortable, whatever that might be. It's their special sauce. So it could be proprietary. We've Heard that term proprietary from Jason Webb, one of the legal experts on our platform. And Jason talks about proprietary technology is sometimes more enforceable around the world because it has the same definition, whereas patents don't. They differ from country to country and it has no expiration date. I mentioned this on Jason's episode. I work for companies, Milliken and Company, in particular a textile company, who didn't share their technology. It's proprietary. They filed lots of patents, but they didn't file patents on a lot of these things. And they've had a lock on being able to create a very specific style that no one knows how to do, because they created a machine around it, they kept it a secret, they didn't patent it, and they've been making it for over 30 years. And so they can be so much more than that. And how you create this original product, it's me only. How you get into this me only.

Territory, a great way to think about that is a recipe. A recipe can be a trade secret and not actually be registered anywhere as intellectual property. And a recipe could be for food, but it also could be a formula for something else. Didn't necessarily have to be food. But Coca Cola is, I think, the premier example of a trade secret that was never patented or published anywhere. The formula for Coca Cola, which there is supposedly an original formula somewhere within, under lock and key somewhere, Coca Cola Corporation. And of course, they have so many different versions of soft drinks they make now that the original formula is probably less important than it once was. But the reality is, for the better part of 100 years, Coca Cola has been a huge corporation and they had a unique product, a unique selling proposition because their product tasted better than anybody else's, at least according to them, and it was incredibly valuable. And if they had tried to patent that chemical formula, which you can do if you want to, they would have had to disclose their formula to the world. And they've gotten a lot more value and wealth out of that.

And thinking about it from the sand, it's not just that fact that this is secret. It's the fact that it was valuable to the consumers. They wanted that better taste. It meant something to them. They were willing to buy that brand, even though there were other colas on the market, because they liked the way that tastes. So that was the thing that resonated, and that's what I really wanted to get across here in that a unique selling proposition isn't just a feature, isn't just something you talk about and say on your videos and put in your market, materials and design into your product. It needs to be the thing that makes people buy you over someone else. It needs to have that kind of relevance and importance. And that's why I wanted to sort of bring that up today, Tom, so we could talk about that. Because when you don't have that relevance happen, when you don't have it being the reason to buy you, there is a lot of competition. So even if you have features that nobody else has, they've never seen before, it's an invention and it's really cool to you. If they don't care, they're going to buy something else with their money. And that's not going to build a sustainable business for you. That's not a sustainable product line. That is not a multimillion dollar winner. How do you get to that relevance and how do you do that in me only territory? I thought Tom, be really great to talk a little bit about our process by how we do this.

Okay. I believe there's opportunity for every company and everybody watching this video to develop or have developed for you to create a unique me only product. It's really a matter of decision to do it. Now there are a lot of variables as to what that product might end up being at the end of the process, but it's really just a matter of deciding to do it. And it's about spending the time and probably spending the money because it often will require expenses. So it may be at the very early days of your business, you're not able to just financially justify that. Okay. And then there's a lot of things you can do to prepare yourself for that over time. But then eventually you get to the point where you can afford the effort, the time, the money and everybody can do it. But it is a philosophy, right?

For us, it's a mindset that we start out to say is that there's always an opportunity. There is no brand that is so good that they don't have a gap. You know that all you have to do is a little bit of research to find that out. Go on the reviews. Too often I see this happen. The bigger the brand is or the more full of themselves that they are. Typically they're like, that's not our customer. That's what they say when they get a bad review. That's not our customer. We don't care.

Isn't that convenient?

Yeah. But in that is the greatest opportunities. So this is something that we do as a practice is that we do significant research before we set pen or pencil to paper or work in a computer. We spent a significant amount of time on the research side understanding the competitive landscape, the product features. Competitive landscape. So who are competitors? Where are their strengths and weaknesses? Could they just throw money at tooling and manufacturing power and outgun us all the time?

Or more marketing dollars?

Or more marketing dol. Right. For an inferior product, more marketing dollars. And that's kind of Rick's point that he was making in his episode was that the less differentiated you are, the more money and effort you have to.

Spend in marketing, it's harder to do it and it ends up making you less profitable. At the end of the day, if you have a more of a unique original product that resonates with the consumer, whether that's making an emotional connection with them, that it just looks better, feels better, it's more comfortable, or maybe it actually has some unique and better features that has capabilities the other products don't have. That's great if you can do that. But if you have a product that is inherently unique and more desirable, the reality is you won't have to spend as much money to market it. This is why actually, when you think about it, let's briefly return to the Coca Cola example for a minute. And I know that doesn't apply to anybody on our platform. None of you are major beverage bottlers, right?

We have a couple of.

Do we have some.

Yeah, we have some food and beverage people.

I stand corrected.

Yeah. Okay. Plus, don't remember our Pickle Pops guy.

But if you go back to the Coca Cola example, certainly there are dozens of companies now in the United States. It was different when Coca Cola was new because they were the first. But now there are dozens of companies that make a cola of some kind. There's Coke and Pepsi are the biggest. You've got RC Cola and then you've got all these. You know what Polar is one that's in New England. There's lots of regional bottlers that have a version of cola. And then even some of the big supermarket chains have their own no name version of cola.

Right? But some other more current and recent examples are to be thinking about like Warby Parker and Eyeglasses. That's a really great example of the eyeglass market's really closed and tight and multi billion dollar industry. Warby Parker was able to come in and innovate in how they delivered it. And the product's unique, but it's not amazing. And still that worked for them. It doesn't always have to be product features, right? It can be services or how it's provided or how it's delivered. And all of that adds to a me only experience and how you're doing that. You're separating yourself. There's another really great example that I want to mention. It's company called Sustain and they make tampons and toxin free and they disclose all the material so Proctor and Gamble does not. So they make pads and tampons and condoms and they're all vegan and they all have no toxins in them and they all have disclose every single bit of what they put into them. And they've done it on purpose. And they have sold millions of units in three years, short period of time to be selling millions of units in a very, very difficult enclosed industry to get into because they tapped into something that stresses the audience out. Women are concerned about what they stuck in their body and are a little pissed that the FDA won't force the Proctor and Gamble and other companies to disclose the ingredients. Because that's in my body and it should have to be regulated like a medical product that's invasive. And so that's really where this woman came up with this innovation because she had been lobbying to try to get disclosure on the ingredients, couldn't get it and said, forget that. I'm making a product that I know exactly what's in it. And I bet you there are other women out there who want that. And there were.

Well, and what's brilliant about that is now they've turned that into why they are unique and different. It's become their me only aspect of their product. Because in that industry, similar to that cola soda industry, in order to rise above the crowd, really the only thing those companies could do because they all pretty much offer the same thing in the way of diapers. For instance, everybody's got diapers, everybody's got size newborn to size, whatever, four or five, whatever they have. And the only way that they can differentiate is either to license characters to print on them, some of them have Disney princesses on them and others don't. Or you throw more marketing dollars at it and just try to get your brand name more known. And so that's the same thing with the soda example. But here that's brilliant for how company then changed the rules, they changed the game. Even though there were no regulations requiring it. They turned that instead of what Procter and Gamble and those other companies thought would be a liability if they had to disclose all the chemicals that are in there, more knockoffs turned it into an asset and a unique selling value proposition.

She's earned women's trust in her products and in her brand. And that translates into month after month purchases. So you're talking about very, very high brand loyalty, of which most women do not have that many, many will buy the cheapest thing out there. On top of which, like, there's another company that women's razors. Women's razors were assessed of pink tacks. So are tampons.

So are still many of these things. Still are.

They are. Absolutely. So just because they make it in pink, even though it's exactly the same as a jealette, but they market it to women, they charge more money for the women's version of the razor. It's exactly the same.

Yeah. It ends up being a tax for the consumer. It's not a tax for the company. The company is just taking an advantage and making a larger profit margin on those products for women.

And so this woman got pissed, invented her, designed her own razor. It's really nice design. It's ergonomic. It's not amazing. It's still a razor. Right. It doesn't have like tons of research on blade development or anything like that, but it's nice. But it doesn't charge you that much money. And so it's become the consumable that it should be. And she's earned trust because of that. That's an article that I wrote about for Inc. I'm blanking on the name. It's. Who are you thinking of the name of the brand? I don't know why I.

For the diaper company?

No, for the razor. Starts with a B. Billy. Thank you, Billy. Billy. Anyway, I wrote an article about them, so we'll link that in the post here. It's a great model for it and I loved interviewing the founders. These are things that you want to think about. And overall, your whole unique selling proposition, though, might be product features, but how you market those product features, and that's really where you want to go back to Rick and really start talking about who your brand is, what it wants to be, what it wants to stand for. And if it's trust and transparency, like those last two examples we just gave you, then you want to head into that. So you want to become the next sustain. If it's yeti coolers and you want to be just the coolest thing out there that everybody premium wants to have, then you better know that and you better make sure that the product reflects that in its originality. But so does your marketing, so does your brand. So do all of those things that you build into it and it makes Rick's job easier. Whoever you do work with to video market and content market and generate your brand. Did you have anything else you wanted to add, Tom, about being me only?

The only thing I want to say, just to put it in context, is I think very often, in fact we recommend it to our clients and our members here on this platform that you don't always want to start immediately with a me only product, especially if you have a new company, you're just starting out, or you're branching into a new product category. Very often you may want to buy something that exists, just be a reseller of it or private label it, you know, whatever.

Brenda's suggestion of bundling. Right.

Try something like that in order to test the market and to prove as you have and say, Tracy, will the dogs eat the dog food before you're going to go invest a lot more dollars in developing that me only product and paying to manufacture and maybe make molds for that me only product.

So we also have another new expert who's going to come on the platform in the next month in Caleb Allen. And Caleb and I were talking about, if you want to do that, it may be in your best interest not to throw it up on Amazon, unless you already sort of have an established brand and you're selling multiple products and you're really comfortable in there, but actually running a funnel or a mini funnel and running something like that to test out a bundled product or a, as Tom put it, the AB model. Right. So you're going in with whatever that exists and test that out. Because if you could even get a thousand people, and Lara was really clear that you shouldn't have less than 300. And Laura Hazard, our market research expert, we shouldn't have less than 300. And if you can get closer to a thousand, you get more statistically significant information on your market research side of things. So in that case, if you can get a thousand people to sign up through the funnel and you could send them a preview model, or you could send them information or show them side by sides of the new product with the one that they did buy from you and ask them their opinion and get their input, you could go back to those people and offer them great discounts for them to come and write reviews for you and testimonials for you. Now you're going to jumpstart and really be sure that your new me only product has a better resonance with the market. So I like Caleb's strategy for a startup as well to do that because it helps build you that early fan base who's going to go out there and be an advocate for you and really help you to have momentum to building the reviews. Because that's a really hard thing when you're starting up nowadays.

I think that's a great point, Tracy, but the reality is, I think that if you are a business owner that wants to eventually either build a brand that's valuable enough that someone's going to buy it or license it, but I would think mostly buy it, or you want to either sell the brand or sell the company, think at some point you've really got to get to the point where you are creating the only.

Product and it becomes your asset.

Profit margins and some of that could involve intellectual property that also becomes an asset, but the products itself could be an asset. What did we learn, Tracy?

Brand value.

But at the Prosper show there was somebody speaking from the stage who had sold their company recently and they had an awful lot of products. They sold a lot of SKUs. And when we looked at it, at the end of the day, they did an awful lot of work for a lot of years to sell their company for what really seemed to be not a whole lot of money. There wasn't much of a premium they got over what their revenue was.

It was less than their annualized revenue. They probably had a lot of devalued skews in the process because that's what happens. You know, stuff trends out and are you on a decline or are you on up? We're stacking S Curves. That's another episode in a podcast here. When we talk about that. It is an issue that your product line can very easily get devalued if there's not that specialness there that resonates with the consumer base that has a build to the brand value because brand value is an intangible. And so being able to add a tangible intellectual property style things proprietary technology accounts in intellectual property definition. It's not just a patent and a trademark. Including all those things together adds actual tangible value. And then that adds into a mix and is a part of that intangible brand value of that fan base that you're building in the trust factor that you've got going on with your consumer base. So all of those things do translate to a bottom line strategy. And so there is no company that I have ever worked for, worked with no brand. And we've worked with brands of all sizes. Herman Miller, Martha Stewart, gigantic companies. And when you look at that at the end of the day. They all have an original product. They want to be the one, the only one in their territory. It is their goal. It is what they do. And so they want to carve out that. I don't want to call it blue ocean because I don't like that term because blue ocean means you're out in the middle of nowhere, all alone. You want to be in shallower waters, but you want to have the waves to yourself. You want to be in there. You want to have that little section where you're not crowded in with everybody. That's what you want. But you don't want to be all the way out there because that's a big spend. So, anyway, we hope this helps you. We wanted to set some context for Rick Ceceri and Jerry Foster. Brenda Creamy. There isn't an expert on this platform that our talk doesn't set up. And I want to make that clear to you guys that they're all here for you. That's why we brought them together. Because everything that we do, all together, we all have the same philosophy here at Product Launch Hazards. And our philosophy is to grow a big sustainable brand that is profitable, that gets you what you're looking for, gets you going, gets you where you want to go. And we all need to work together to make that happen. Because you cannot do it alone. You can't do it because there are so many things that you don't know that you don't know.

That's for sure.

So until next time, this has been Tracy and Tom.

Thanks so much for watching, everybody. We'll talk to you next time on Product Launch Hazards.

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