Adweek posted an interesting article about Emerald Nuts’ latest ad campaign and tagline that was created from an Amazon.com review of the product.
The review simply said, “Yes Good” and it is a great ad for the sheer simplicity of it.
But what this ad and the whole campaign highlights more than anything else is where the common belief to dump more and more features into any campaign or marketing promotion steers a brand wrong.
You see, by simplifying the message Emerald has proven the point that value isn’t about features, but benefits.
If you visit the Emerald Nuts’ website, you will see that they offer probably over 50 different items.
Which if you are the poor marketing or communications person in charge of driving sales, seems like an easy place to start thinking about how to sell nuts.
But the thing is…no one cares about the many different flavors, or the many different packages or types. If you see the brand, Emerald Nuts, in the store…”Yes Good” is exactly what you need to know to cut through the clutter of nuts for sale in most places.
You have Planters, generic, Blue Diamond, and Fischer to name just a few. (Definitely get the Kirkland cashews though…they are really the best.)
If you don’t have a simple way of creating a unique value proposition in your customers’ mind, you will lose.
As we’ve seen from countless psychological studies and I have written about extensively, when their is too much choice, the choice is no choice. Or, if you are looking at nuts…you will default to the brand you’ve always used or the cheap brand.
This really circles back to value though.
Because in most cases, it is easy for us to get trapped into a discussion about value that centers on some esoteric idea or some collection of features that have been tested and that all of our marketing people think are outstanding.
In the real world, people don’t buy based on this kind of stuff.
They buy do to the improvement that your product or service is going to create for them.
The change that is going to occur.
That’s an area that Apple mined so well in the early 2000s when Steve Jobs and Apple famously came up with the idea that Apple products “It Just Works.”
Put “Yes Good” right up there because in the real world, people only buy benefits and improvement.
Or, if they buy something else, they are buying based on price and you are a commodity…in which case, you likely already lost.