Late-Night Infomercials: Where Dreams of Transformation Begin
If you’re old enough you can remember late-night infomercials.
That odd programming block on TV that started sometime past midnight lasting until the early morning, when nobody was awake save for the lone soul looking to change his life with a new knife or a new sealant or a new workout program.
Great marketing illuminates the lack in one’s life and magnifies it to a state where a solution to one’s problem becomes the ultimate meaning of life.
The Genius of P90X: Extreme Results Through ‘Muscle Confusion’
One of the all-time best infomercials I’ve ever seen was the original P90X home workout DVD from Beachbody.
It effectively and efficiently tells the stories of normal people getting these crazy fitness transformations in the comfort of their own homes in a shockingly fast timeframe. We’re talking the extreme before-and-after pictures of someone fat and out of shape to this lean, mean, fighting machine.
Now those results are shocking and certainly draw one into the narrative, but it is the unique method P90X is promoting which drives the problem and creates the solution.
It is this idea of “muscle confusion,” which is not really a thing but a great marketing strategy.
See, the reason why you haven’t been able to get these drastic results by going to the gym every day for a decade is because your muscles have become adapted to the workouts. So if you take advantage of “muscle confusion” you’ll always keep your muscles guessing and will see this rapid change.
What are the makers and promoters of this workout program doing here?
They are justifying the stunning results you see, the before and after, with a unique reason why it happened that only their workout program will be able to show you.
Why the ‘Unique Selling Proposition’ Falls Short in Marketing
This does a few things for the marketer.
First, it allows the results to be believable and makes it so it becomes achievable. It not only justifies the before and after but it establishes a narrative that you too can achieve these results.
Second, it creates a proprietary system that can only be found in the product. It essentially establishes an us vs. them narrative, where we are the only ones with you and everyone else is outside of that camp.
You start to think that “if only” I had this then I could become what I’ve always wanted.
And lastly, it educates the customer so that the education justifies the previous two reasons.
Sometimes this is referred to in sales or marketing literature as a “unique selling proposition” but I feel like this isn’t going deep enough on what is happening here in the marketing.
A unique selling proposition is the difference between you as a product in that category versus every other product in that category.
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Brian Tracy’s Safety Glass Pitch: A Masterclass in Differentiation
If you think of selling glass, it is a pretty unremarkable product—you can look through it and that’s about it.
Brian Tracy talks about in The Psychology of Selling the introduction of safety glass and the use of the unique selling proposition in marketing it.
Suddenly you have something that no one else in the market has, it solves the problem of the one defect of glass: it’s fragile.
He talks about a salesperson who becomes the top rep in the company by going out to the prospects and asking, “Would you like to see a piece of glass that doesn’t shatter?” Then the sales rep puts a piece of glass on the prospect’s desk and smashes it with a ball-peen hammer.
The customer instinctively covers his eyes to protect them from flying glass, but there is none.
He outsold everyone in the company because he saw the “unique selling proposition” of the product and then focused all of his efforts on presenting it in a captivating way.
From Unique Selling Propositions to Unique Stories: A Deeper Strategy
The problem as I see it with the “unique selling proposition” is that it doesn’t drill deep enough into the idea, it sort of glosses over the term. It doesn’t explain what muscle confusion is.
It lumps a lot of things together into one which I think need to be separated to be effectively marketed or sold.
If we think about a product like glass, what are some of the ways to differentiate our glass from their glass?
One of the ways could be that our glass is cheaper to manufacture, so it’s cheaper for the consumer. Another could be that our glass isn’t cheaper, but it is from local artisans who have been making glass for a thousand years.
Another could be that our glass isn’t cheaper, but it comes from all organic sands. Another could be this is safety glass, so it’s stronger than normal glass.
All of these propositions I just listed need to be justified to make sense.
There must be a reason why it is the way I am saying it is.
If we go with our example for a cheaper glass, we can’t just say that this glass is cheaper and point to our price versus everyone else’s price. I mean, I guess that will work to get a small percentage of the marketplace who is only interested in price.
But when I give a reason as to why it’s cheaper, suddenly there is a story that can be used to sell this idea.
Because our company has discovered a chemical process traditionally associated with paper making and applied it to glass manufacturing, we’ve been able to cut the cost of manufacturing significantly, and we’re able to pass those savings along to you, our customer.
This becomes the packaging behind the uniqueness.
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The Full Formula: How P90X Turned a Concept of Muscle Confusion Into a Revolution
However, if we look back at our P90X infomercial, there is something else happening in this “unique selling proposition.”
They’ve given it a great marketing name of “muscle confusion,” which immediately opens up the mind to start asking questions.
It sparks curiosity.
It immediately puts the prospect into a position of wanting to find out more.
Maybe it will help to explain how exercise works to illuminate this.
When we lift weights or go for a run, we are pushing ourselves into new territory where the body needs to adapt. We get sore because the body is building new pathways for adaption. Now we return and lift the weights or go for the run, and the body is more adapted so it’s easier, and eventually we get to the place where the body is adapted.
So in order to get stronger when lifting weights, we need to keep going up in weights and lifting more or using the same weight to increase more repetitions. This is called progressive overload.
In traditional weight training programming, the body eventually maxes out on adaption, and in order to keep adapting, we need to deload the weight so the body can recover and then start progressive overload again.
What the marketers of P90X have done is named this concept.
They’ve named this adaption cycle and pushed it to the forefront of the marketing.
Now this “unique selling proposition” becomes a “unique method” with “a unique method of working” and a whole host of “credibility and research” that supports its effectiveness.
What we have here by expanding this idea of the “unique selling proposition” into three separate ideas is the full sequence that differentiates a top-performing sales rep from an average sales rep.
We have the full formula to create this unique positioning in the marketplace.
We have a ‘what’ our “unique method” is.
We have a ‘how’ our “unique method” works.
And we have a ‘why’ our “unique method” works.
When you combine all of these, you have a formula for a story to position your product outside of everything else.
Film it. Put it on late-night TV. Suddenly you’ve taken the world by storm like P90X.
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