Be The First, Not The Best!

After my last arti­cle on viral mar­ket­ing, some emailed me want­ing more infor­ma­tion about how to cre­ate the per­cep­tion of uniqueness.

Let me give you a few tips, largely based on the “Law Of Lead­er­ship,” one of The 22 Immutable Laws of Mar­ket­ing from my two favorite men­tors, Jack Trout and Al Ries.

The law sim­ply states that it’s bet­ter to be the first in your mar­ket or prod­uct cat­e­gory than it is to be the best in one.

Often, many busi­nesses build their entire mar­ket­ing strat­egy around a par­tic­u­lar brand and its “bet­ter” qual­i­ties. Claim­ing supe­ri­or­ity smacks of being untrue and is often a very risky endeavor. If you claim you’re the best, your state­ment will likely be suspect.

A men­tor once told me some­thing that pro­foundly affected how I think about marketing…

“Impli­ca­tion is more pow­er­ful than specification.”

I real­ized that this, in itself, implied many things as well. Whether he intended it or not, what I pulled from that state­ment is, it is more effec­tive to imply supe­ri­or­ity — to be per­ceived as being supe­rior — than to being or out­right stat­ing that one is superior.

The ques­tion then becomes, how do you cre­ate the per­cep­tion of supe­ri­or­ity? How do you get oth­ers to think you’re the best with­out stat­ing it out­right, much less pro­mote it?

The fol­low­ing are a few point­ers to guide you in that direction.

If you’re the first in some prod­uct cat­e­gory, then you are also con­sid­ered as the best. Peo­ple have the nat­ural ten­dency to attribute supe­ri­or­ity to a prod­uct that’s first in its cat­e­gory. And that’s regard­less of the fact that there may be other, bet­ter products.

This is the immense power of what Trout and Ries refer to as “positioning.”

If you’re not the first, you can usu­ally invent your own posi­tion. If there’s no cat­e­gory in which you can be first, then cre­ate one. By being the first in your very own unique cat­e­gory makes it tremen­dously dif­fi­cult for com­peti­tors to copy you.

But even when your com­peti­tors do copy you, and even if they’re bet­ter than you, since you are the first their mar­ket­ing efforts will only help to remind peo­ple of… you!

For exam­ple, the Apple iPhone is not just another wire­less phone. “Wire­less phone” or “cel­lu­lar phone” are the more con­ven­tional cat­e­gories. If iPhone pro­moted itself in these cat­e­gories, it would have a lot of com­pe­ti­tion to con­tend with.

How­ever, it’s more than that. The entire key­pad uses a touch­screen, and the phone doesn’t use any keys at all. And as such, it cre­ated its own prod­uct cat­e­gory. Call it the “key­less phone.” (In fact, the more pop­u­lar cat­e­gory nowa­days is the “smart phone.”)

Any sub­se­quent phone that enters the mar­ket will only remind peo­ple of the iPhone.

But there’s some­thing that’s more impor­tant, here: being the first is not as impor­tant as being per­ceived as the first — the first in the mar­ket­place. You don’t have to be the first, tech­ni­cally. You sim­ply have to be the first in the mind.

Work­ing with cos­metic sur­geons, I’ve per­son­ally expe­ri­enced this unde­ni­able truth.

A par­tic­u­lar hair trans­plant doc­tor is one of the first sur­geons of this type. While supe­ri­or­ity in this field is a mat­ter of artis­tic abil­ity and not senior­ity, he is still widely rec­og­nized as the best sur­geon there is — even if he still uses out­dated techniques.

He still uses the old-​​fashioned “plug” tech­nique. But even when his com­peti­tors use more mod­ern tech­niques or their results are far more natural-​​looking, peo­ple still asso­ciate supe­ri­or­ity to him since he is the first in their minds.

Inci­den­tally, one doc­tor from Toronto whom I con­sulted with used a more advanced micro­scopic process, where hair fol­li­cles were trans­planted one strand at a time. So we decided to repo­si­tion him as the pio­neer behind “micro-​​follicular transplantation.”

As men­tioned ear­lier, Trout and Ries, the fathers of posi­tion­ing, devel­oped the cat­e­gory con­cept into a sci­ence. The first law in their book “The 22 Immutable Laws of Mar­ket­ing,” which is the law of lead­er­ship, is based entirely on the con­cept of being the first.

The law states that no two bod­ies can occupy the same space. If you get to a posi­tion first, your posi­tion is vir­tu­ally guar­an­teed. Nobody else can ever take your place.

But by being first in the mind, the posi­tion is not held by you — it’s held by the con­sumer. And because “they own it,” they will, often uncon­sciously, fight to keep it there.

So how do you posi­tion your­self as being the first?

You don’t have to be the first. You only have to be the first in the consumer’s mind.

By own­ing the lead­ing posi­tion in the mind peo­ple will auto­mat­i­cally assume that you’re the best. Why? It’s because unique­ness sep­a­rates you from the rest rather than com­pares you to them. It’s immensely more effec­tive than actu­ally being the best.

For instance, Ries and Trout prove this point with a very sim­ple question.

They ask: “Who was the third per­son to fly over the Atlantic in a solo flight?” If you’re not a his­tory buff like me, you will likely be stumped. Almost every­one remem­bers that Lind­bergh was the first because, being the first, he comes to mind immediately.

But if the ques­tion was rephrased in a dif­fer­ent way, as in, “Who was the first woman to fly over the Atlantic in a solo flight?” Your answer will likely be “Amelia Earhart.”

Can you see the dif­fer­ence? Essen­tially, both ques­tions led to the same answer. But by repo­si­tion­ing Amelia Earhart as the first woman, the answer came to mind instantly.

Sim­i­larly, look at your own life: what are the things you remem­ber the most? Chances are, you will remem­ber your first kiss, your first car, your first job, your first heart­break, etc. Can you remem­ber your sec­ond kiss let alone your fifth one? Prob­a­bly not.

When it comes to mar­ket­ing, the same holds true.

Many busi­nesses try to com­pete by com­par­i­son and may even gen­er­ate some recog­ni­tion. But where they often fail is in cre­at­ing last­ing top-​​of-​​mind aware­ness by drown­ing their image in a cur­rently known, often highly com­pet­i­tive, category.

Every­body knows who is the first in some cat­e­gory or another, but rarely do peo­ple remem­ber who’s sec­ond let alone third. If you mar­ket your com­pany as a bet­ter firm with a bet­ter prod­uct or ser­vice at a bet­ter price, all you are really doing is remind­ing oth­ers of that which you are bet­ter than — which, of course, is your competition.

Again, if there’s no cat­e­gory in which you can be the first, man­u­fac­ture one. Hav­ing your very own cat­e­gory is pow­er­ful because it is impos­si­ble for com­peti­tors to beat you.

Here’s another bril­liant exam­ple from Ries and Trout.

Coke has been out­selling Pepsi because Coke was the first in the mind.

But Coke, “The Real Thing,” is an old com­pany with a hundred-​​year old recipe locked in some secret safe. So, after years of try­ing to com­pete with Coke, Pepsi decided to go the other way and pro­claimed that it was for the “New Gen­er­a­tion.” Its sales shot up.

On the other hand, for years 7UP floun­dered in the cola cat­e­gory until it became the “Uncola.” As a result, the more Coke and Pepsi adver­tised, the more it helped 7UP.

For a long time, Avis was an unknown car rental agency. One day, it finally con­ceded it was num­ber two, sec­ond after Hertz. Their “we try harder” cam­paign, which focused on their under­dog posi­tion, turned the size of their big­ger com­peti­tor into a negative.

Domino’s was surely not the first pizze­ria. But in a recent inter­view, Tom Mon­aghan, who started the pizze­ria with his brother, claimed that, by being the first to deliver its pizza “in 30 min­utes or it’s free,” it went from a small restau­rant to a mul­ti­mil­lion dol­lar franchise.

And there are count­less other examples.

How can you do this yourself?

For instance, you can be the first to cater to a spe­cific mar­ket, the first to offer an alter­na­tive to an exist­ing prod­uct or ser­vice, or the first to cater to a mar­ket in a unique way — such as by offer­ing an ordi­nary prod­uct or ser­vice but with a unique twist.

You can also cus­tomize a gen­eral prod­uct or ser­vice for a spe­cific mar­ket. For exam­ple, you’re a travel agency. Your biggest clients are finan­cial insti­tu­tions. You could decide on being the first to sell busi­ness trips cater­ing exclu­sively to finan­cial institutions.

How­ever, if you’re not the first, then you might then mar­ket your­self as “the leader in busi­ness trips for bankers” or “the first travel agent for the smart financier.”

John Carl­ton, the mas­ter at find­ing hooks for his copy, is well-​​known for his “one-​​legged golfer” saleslet­ter. After inter­view­ing the author of the “how-​​to golf bet­ter” course and get­ting him to talk about how the prod­uct came about, the owner non­cha­lantly claimed that he got the idea from watch­ing an amputee golfer who seem­ingly hit balls farther.

The idea was, any­one can hit longer dri­ves if they knew how to bal­ance their bod­ies cor­rectly, which is what this one golfer was forced to learn. While golf improve­ment is a fiercely com­pet­i­tive niche, that let­ter became the most swiped saleslet­ter in the world.

(Even John tends to posi­tion him­self in a unique way by call­ing him­self “the most ripped-​​off copy­writer on the planet.” And he def­i­nitely has earned that position.)

Speak­ing of sales copy, look at my own story.

I don’t really con­sider myself to be a great copy­writer. But because I wrote the copy for the first known prod­uct launch that made a mil­lion dol­lars in one day (i.e., John Reese’s Traf­fic Secrets), peo­ple often refer to me as the Internet’s top copywriter.

Even though that record has been shat­tered numer­ous times — and I must add, with num­bers that over­shadow any of my accom­plish­ments, and by copy­writ­ers who I believe are many times bet­ter than me — that posi­tion stuck in many people’s minds.

This achieve­ment is almost always men­tioned in inter­views I give, or as part of my intro­duc­tion at sem­i­nars by the sem­i­nar host, with­out any prompt­ing from me. In fact, nowa­days peo­ple often dub me as the “Roger Ban­nis­ter of Inter­net Copy.”

(Roger Ban­nis­ter, if you’re not famil­iar with him, was the first run­ner who broke the four-​​minute mile bar­rier — which was an elu­sive goal that was long thought to be impos­si­ble but has been sur­passed count­less times since… and then some.)

What unique twist can you add to your busi­ness, prod­uct, or offer?

If you can’t find one, then man­u­fac­ture it. Now, I don’t mean to man­u­fac­ture in the sense of lying. I mean to find pieces of infor­ma­tion about you or your offer you can put together in a dif­fer­ent and unique way in order to cre­ate an entirely new hook.

Here’s a case in point…

That one hair trans­plant sur­geon men­tioned ear­lier uses used a com­mon sur­gi­cal pro­ce­dure with the help of stereo­scopic dis­sect­ing micro­scopes, which enabled him to trans­plant hairs one strand at a time, rather than the more tra­di­tional “plugs.”

Doc­tors are pro­hib­ited by law to claim supe­ri­or­ity. So, we needed to imply it. How? We called his tech­nique “Micro-​​Follicular Redis­tri­b­u­tion Process.” (The tech­nique even became known as the gold stan­dard in the hair restora­tion com­mu­nity, as a result.)

This doesn’t have to be the name, and the prod­uct doesn’t have to be new.

It can be telling a story behind its cre­ation, adding extra ele­ments not part of the core prod­uct (such as extra guar­an­tees, addi­tional ser­vices, free deliv­ery, hybrid offers, unique bonuses, etc), or sell­ing the same prod­uct to a whole new niche or market.

Bot­tom line, don’t be the best. Be the first. By doing so, you’re going to cre­ate an almost instant trust­wor­thi­ness, cred­i­bil­ity, and supe­ri­or­ity — with­out hav­ing to out­right claim it.

What’s bet­ter: claim­ing to be the best (which comes from you, and there­fore makes your claim sus­pect)? Or let­ting your audi­ence believe that you are? Nat­u­rally, the lat­ter wins.

Why? Because in this case, they own that posi­tion — not you. And it there­fore becomes unshak­able, even if some­one else appears on the scene and tries to com­pete with you.

So ask your­self, what can you make unique about your busi­ness? Your prod­uct? Your copy? Your offer? Or the process by which you reach, sell, and serve your cus­tomers? Remem­ber, it doesn’t have to be unique. It only needs to be per­ceived as such.

And remem­ber, per­ceived truth is more pow­er­ful than truth itself.

About the Author

Last 5 Posts By Michel Fortin

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