The Proprietary Solution is the unique piece, part, component, aspect, process, or system behind your product or service which delivers the Primary Promise for your audience.
It’s the thing within your product or service that gives your prospect the result.
It’s the reason why your product or service works.
For example:
- It could be the unique algorithm behind your SEO software that gets users top Google rankings.
- The unique combination of nutrients in your vitamin supplement that lowers cholesterol by 30 points.
- The unique bodywork method you use in your massage practice which eliminates your client’s pain within 20 minutes.
- The unique recipe you use when baking your birthday cakes that makes them so delicious.
Again, the Proprietary Solution is the unique part of your product or service which is responsible for fulfilling your Primary Promise.
And having a Proprietary Solution is incredibly powerful because it gives your prospects hope in your product or service.
It gives them hope that maybe this time… with your product or service… they will experience the result — the result which has eluded them, the result which they didn’t experience from the other products and services they’ve bought.
It gives them hope because they view the Proprietary Solution as the thing they’ve been missing.
The one thing they haven’t tried. The one thing that’s been missing from all the other products and services they’ve bought.
It gives them hope that maybe this time things will be different because of the Proprietary Solution. Because they’ve never tried another product or service with this mechanism.
So… maybe… this will be the difference-maker for them. It’s also worth noting — having a Proprietary Solution also prevents your product or service from being viewed as a commodity, as a generic solution.
And in the process prevents something I refer to as the Google Click Punch.
A Proprietary Solution Helps You Avoid The Google Click Punch
When you’re marketing a commodity or a generic solution, like a vitamin D supplement, a book on ten ways to grow your garden faster, or a one-hour consultation… what you’re presenting is a commodity.
It’s generic.
It’s common.
And, when presented with a commodity, people are propelled to pause your video, go over to Google, and do a quick search for a cheaper, more convenient way of getting the same commodity.
Let’s suppose, for example, you’re marketing and selling a fat burning supplement. And in your marketing, you tell prospects the reason why your fat burner works is because it contains the Garcinia Cambogia.
Well, you’ve now just presented a commodity – Garcinia Cambogia. It’s something they can find anywhere. At a health food store, or right on Amazon.
Now… because you’re presented a commodity… there’s nothing special about your supplement. Nothing unique. Nothing different.
So, all they have to do is press pause on your video, go over to Google, and type in Garcinia Cambogia. And they’ll be given tens of different options for where to get it cheaper, faster, etc.
That’s an example of a marketing message and a marketing idea that triggers the Google Click Punch.
Where someone can simply go get all the information you’re presenting them with right on Google. And possibly buy your commodity from one of your competitors or an alternate vendor.
That’s why you never, ever should market a commodity or generic solution.
You want to market and sell a proprietary solution. And that’s what having a Proprietary Solution gives you.
With a Proprietary Solution behind your Primary Promise (PP), you’re presenting a unique product, because you’re the only one offering it. Your audience can’t get it anywhere else. They can’t find it anywhere else even if they do a search on Google.
You’re the only product, the only software, the only program, the only vendor of the Proprietary Solution you’re presenting. That’s why it’s unique. And that’s why you’re product is not viewed as some commodity or generic solution.
FrogTape Example
Let’s look at a few real-world examples to really make this clear. The FrogTape® brand, marketed by ShurTech Brands markets and sells painters tape.
Their Primary Promise: Use our tape and you never have to worry about paint bleeding over to areas where it shouldn’t.
On the surface this seems like a commodity.
Do a quick Google search and you’ll find hundreds of different brands and options for painters tape.
But there’s one thing which sets FrogTape® apart — their Proprietary Solution FrogTape® is able to fulfill on their promise of “no bleeding” because their tape is built with Paint Block Technology®.
While other tape manufacturers claim wonderful things about what their painter’s tape does and how it works, none offer Paint Block Technology®. That can only be found with FrogTape®.
So, while other companies are stuck fighting it out in the red ocean of commoditized painters tape, Shurtape Technologies is marketing something different — premium-quality, innovative painting tapes that feature PaintBlock® Technology, “which keeps paint out and keeps lines sharp”.
Today, Shurtape Technologies generates over $480 million dollars in sales. Not too shabby for painters tape.
Sleeping Well, LLC is a company that markets and sells a mouthpiece to help eliminate snoring. It’s called ZQuiet®.
Sleeping Well Example
Their Primary Promise: A comfortable mouthguard that eliminates snoring in just days.
Again, on the surface, it seems like a commodity.
A quick Google search for the term “snoring mouth guard” reveals over 1,910,000 websites listed.
But, like FrogTape®, there’s one thing which sets ZQuiet® apart from all other mouth guards. They call it Living Hinge Technology.
It’s their Proprietary Solution Mechanism. The reason why ZQuiet® is so effective, yet so comfortable, is — as they claim — because of the Living Hinge Technology behind their mouthguard.
According to their site:
It (Proprietary Solution) enables you to sleep comfortably throughout the night no matter how you are positioned and whether your mouth is open or closed (Primary Promise).
See, they’re not just making a promise and trying to sell an average, run-of-the-mill mouth guard. That would be a commodity. That would allow prospects to do a search for a cheaper mouthguard. No.
They’re marketing something different; their Proprietary Solution — a mouthguard with Living Hinge Technology. It’s not a generic mouthguard. It’s not a commodity.
And surprise, surprise… they’re the only company that offers it.
And it’s allowed them to do extraordinarily well. The anti-snoring market — yes, there’s an entire market around snoring — is a billion-dollar-plus market.
Let’s look at one more example.
You’ve likely heard of P90X. It’s one of those intense in-home exercise programs.
P90X Example
The company behind P90X is BeachBody. The early versions of their marketing didn’t demonstrate a Proprietary Solution.
So, as they shared in a New York Times article, “The early P90X infomercials bombed.”
In fact, the company wasted tons of cash trying 14 different versions of the infomercial before they really started to make money in 2006. Once they introduced the right Proprietary Solution, their sales took off.
The Proprietary Solution they came up with: Muscle Confusion.
It’s simply the name they gave to the exercise method behind P90X which produces the weight-loss and muscle-building results for users. In that same New York Times article, BeachBody even said, “P90X is not that special.”
And later in an interview, Tony Horton, the spokesperson for P90X said, “Muscle confusion was just a term we came up with… and we sold millions.”
By 2015, their unique mechanism — muscle confusion — helped BeachBody crack $1 billion in sales, now with over 23 million customers
That’s the impact of having the right Proprietary Solution.
Now, there are three different types of Proprietary Solutions any product or service can have.
As long as you’re not selling a pure commodity, like a gallon of gasoline, you can use one of these three types.
The first type of Proprietary Solution is The Actual Solution.
The Actual Solution
You would use this type of Proprietary Solution when you actually have a unique piece, part, component, process, aspect, system behind your product or service.
When you actually have a unique algorithm in your software. When you actually have a unique ingredient in your pizza sauce.
Think Google’s algorithm, Coca-Cola secret recipe, Caramilk’s secret.
If you have something truly unique in your product or service that produces the results for folks, you have an Actual Solution.
More often than not, your product or service may not have an actual mechanism.
That’s when you’re going to use one of the other two types of mechanisms.
The second type of Proprietary Solution is The Unspoken Solution.
The Unspoken Solution
The Unspoken Solution is used when the mechanism that powers your product or service is not necessarily unique amongst your competitors, but it’s unique to prospects because none of your competitors are talking about it.
In other words, it’s not necessarily just your product or service that has the mechanism.
It may be just you that’s featuring the mechanism in your marketing.
This type of Proprietary Solution stems from the legendary ad man, Claude Hopkins.
Story has it, Claude was brought in by Schlitz Beer to work on their marketing in hopes of capturing greater market share.
So they took Claude on a tour of one of their facilities.
While there he saw something being done to the beer bottles before they were filled with beer. “What’s going on over there?” Claude asked. “Oh, that’s where we sterilize all of our bottles.
All of our bottles go through that sterilization process before we put any beer in there. It helps maintain the purity of our beer.“
Realizing what he just heard, Claude asked, “Well, why aren’t you telling anybody about this? Why aren’t you sharing that as the reason behind the quality of Schlitz beer?” “Because every beer manufacturer uses the same sterilization process,” the tour guide responded.
“But,” Claude retorted, “nobody’s talking about it. Nobody’s presenting it to the market. Nobody’s sharing it with folks.”
So, Claude created an entire marketing campaign around Schlitz’s sterilization process — their Unspoken Solution.
Even though other competitors had the same mechanism, Schlitz’s new campaign was able to recapture a tremendous amount of market share.
Because they were the first and only one to talk about the sterilization process at the time.
So it became their Unspoken Solution. And in the process, give prospects a reason to be hopeful that Schlitz beer would be fresher, purer, and more delicious.
Move up to quality
So, is there a part of your product or service that’s responsible for delivering the Primary Promise, not necessarily unique amongst your competitors, but none of them are talking about it?
If so, it can your Unspoken Solution.
Now, it may be a temporary Proprietary Solution until competitors see that it’s working for you and knock it off. But before they do, it can be an effective Proprietary Solution for your marketing.
The third type of Proprietary Solution is The Transubstantiated Solution.
The Transubstantiated Solution
Despite the strange name, this is the most commonly used type of P.S.
I first learned about the idea of transubstantiation — within a marketing context — from Bill Bonner, founder of Agora. The idea of transubstantiation comes from Roman Catholicism. It’s the principle behind communion when the wine is turned into the blood of Christ.
In a marketing context, the secret of transubstantiation is the idea of turning something ordinary into something extraordinary. Taking the common and making it uncommon and new.
Let’s say for example you were selling a vitamin D supplement.
Well, of course as you now know, simply presenting vitamin D would be marketing and selling a commodity. It would trigger the Google Click Punch.
Well, a little factoid for ya: Did you know vitamin D is one of the most important nutrients taken by astronauts in space? Well, it is.
So, couldn’t we refer to vitamin D in our marketing as… maybe… “The Astronaut’s Nutrient”.
Sure we could.
And by doing so it’s a simple example of a transubstantiated solution. We turned the ordinary — vitamin D — into the extraordinary — “The Astronaut’s Nutrient”.
Ordinary idea: Vitamin D
Extraordinary idea: The Astronaut’s Nutrient
Now, this doesn’t mean the product name needs to be “The Astronaut’s Nutrient”.
In this example, that would just be the name we’ve given to the mechanism behind how and why the supplement works.
And we could then use “The Astronaut’s Nutrient” as the Proprietary Solution in our Big Marketing Idea.
This is just what financial copywriter, Mike Palmer, did with his legendary Secret Currency marketing promotion.
It was all about investing in gold. But Mike knew he couldn’t simply talk about gold investing.
That would be the common. The ordinary. The market was already being slammed with promotions about gold.
During Mike’s research, he found that thru the centuries gold was quietly used by the richest people as a medium of exchange.
So, for his promotion, Mike transubstantiated gold into the “Secret Currency”.
His entire campaign, from headline to offer, was all about how today the Secret Currency could be used by everyday folks to hedge against inflation, deflation, market crashes, etc. And the campaign was a home run.
Ordinary idea: Gold
Extraordinary idea: Secret currency
A Transubstantiated Solution was also used to introduce the marketing world to the “tripwire” by Digital Marketer.
As they presented it a handful of years ago, a tripwire is the first step in their funnel-building approach.
It’s a low-cost, low-barrier-of-entry offer presented to prospects with the aim of turning them into customers.
Here, DM took a piece of their marketing methodology — the low priced offer — and gave it a proprietary name. Tripwire.
While today, the tripwire is associated with Digital Marketer, the idea of a low-cost, low-price offer is nothing new.
It’s been around for decades.
It’s been a longtime staple in the world of direct response marketing That’s not a knock against Digital Marketer. Not at all. If anything it’s a tip of my hat to them. They executed the Transubstantiated Solution beautifully.
See: If DM had simply presented “a low-cost offer” to the market, as the basis of their marketing methodology, they would have been presenting a commodity.
They would have been marketing and selling the generic. The common. And they wouldn’t have gotten nearly the traction they got.
Instead, they transubstantiated the common into something different. And when they presented the idea of a tripwire to the market, it triggered the feeling of something new for prospects.
It made prospects think:
Ah. A tripwire is what I’ve been missing.
That’s the reason why I’ve been struggling. That’s what I need.
And because it was viewed as something new and different, it gave people hope. Hope… that learning and using a tripwire would give them the marketing pay-off they were after. And, for many, it did.
See, Digital Marketer took the ordinary low-cost, low-barrier-of-entry offer and transubstantiated it into something extraordinary. Make sense? Good.
Ordinary idea: Low-cost offer
Extraordinary idea: Tripwire
By this point, we’ve talked about how a Big Marketing Idea is emotionally compelling because it’s built on the back of a Primary Promise which is fulfilled by a Proprietary Solution.
Now, let’s look at the last “ingredient” of our B.M.I.P..
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