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.

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