Does your product have superpowers?

Does your product or service have hidden superpowers?

Maybe you’ve never thought about it that way, but there’s a good chance you could be exploiting some hidden superpowers to get the message out in a powerful way.

Watch this excellent commercial and then read on for more insight.

Has that got you thinking yet?

Here’s the three-step process for creating great advertising like this:

  1. First, do a spoke-and-wheel brainstorm exercise to explore all the different aspects of your product or service.  Here are a few questions to ask yourself in order to approach it from different angles and find that one catchy idea:
    1. What do people do with your product (or category of products) that is unintended (like using the cheese for bait)?
    2. What do people hate about your category? (see the Smell Good Plumber)
    3. How does your product feel, taste, smell, sound?
    4. What outrageous thing can you guarantee? (see Saddleback Leather’s 100 year guarantee)
    5. What feature of your product do you want to focus on as your unique strength or superpower?
  2. Once you’ve explored the ideas above, ask yourself if you can combine any of them.  At Nolan’s Cheese they decided that the “strength” of of the cheddar taste was the superpower.  But it didn’t become a powerful story until they combined it with the common, but unintended use as bait.
  3. Lastly, revise the big idea over and over with the goal of simplifying the message.  If you can package your big idea in a simple, powerful, and easy to consume ad, you’ll be successful.

About Tyler Garns


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