Preaching To The Choir & Selling To The Sold

How many marketers forget the U (unique) in USP.
So many examples of this it’s not funny. A major culprit seems to be selling the product class rather then your product.

What brought it to mind is a CMS/Ecommerce platform I’m using now. And it caught my attention because their marketing is actually good.

But they drill the same USP virtually all ecommerce platforms do (which should be a give away):
“Doing all this without {insert any eccommerce platform here}, would cost you {insert any 5-6 digit sum} and would take {any number) of months to complete”

This hasn’t been unique since the precurser to Yahoo shops launched around 97′. It is pretty much the definition of the product class. The choice 90%+ of their customers are making is between a their product and another in that class. But their USP is trying to sell them on the class, on which they are already sold.

Its like BMW selling you on the advantages of owning your very own car.

*I’m not saying that the desicion to go custom or not is atrivial, it just isn’t the one to answer here. And even if that was the debate going on inside prospects’ heads, you wouldn’t approach it in this way, you would be addressing the issues that make them want custom in the first place.