Do you have (or need) your own Unique Mechanism?
I have a client; I’ll call her Liz.
Liz owns and runs a consulting business. She is the main and only consultant (although she brings in expert partners when needed). Like clients do for many of you (us) “solo-preneurs,” people hire Liz because she’s Liz. She has an enormous amount of experience, knowledge, skill, credibility and expertise in her field.
Liz is not the only person in the world who consults in Liz’s field, but of course she is the only Liz-packaged, Liz-trained, Liz-driven version.
Only Liz does what Liz does in the precise way that Liz does it.
Liz has developed her own clean, elegant series of activities that generate a collection of insightful analyses, time after time after time.
There’s a term in marketing for the proprietary way a solution is found or a problem is solved. It’s called the Unique Mechanism (a concept attributed to copywriter Eugene Schwartz, master marketer of the 60s). Here’s a good definition: “the unique manner, method or material that allows a product or service to deliver the desired benefits” (Todd Brown, 2017, as quoted here)
It’s similar to a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) because it states your competitive advantage; the difference is that a Unique Mechanism promotes the process rather than the result.
You know what the most important part of a Unique Mechanism is?
The name.
Frankly, how the mechanism gets to the result isn’t important. Clients don’t need to know the details of your process beforehand to choose and buy from you. They need to know they will get the result they want thanks to a process only you can provide.
That’s when you introduce your (bonus points for “patented”) Gore-Tex Waterproofing, Cyclone Technology, or PageRank Algorithm. Well… not those, because they’re taken by W. L. Gore & Associates, Dyson and Google.
And that’s where it gets difficult. To claim a Unique Mechanism in your marketing, you want a name that’s descriptive, distinct, appealing, and on-brand.
I saw an opportunity to “name-drop” a unique mechanism into some copy I was writing for Liz. Rather than simply refer to her ‘elegant process’ or her ‘proven approach’ I thought, “I’ll come up with a catchy name double-quick that captures the full intelligence and power of what Liz does!”
And to top off the exercise, I had just learned a prompt formula in an AI for Copywriters Course I’d completed. So in went the prompt:
“You are an expert marketer with experience in both product and offer development. You know that a "Unique Mechanism" is THE thing in your marketing that gives your prospects hope. Specifically it is the part, piece, method, manner, material, component, process or aspect of a product that delivers the results. [COMPANY -- I’ll keep my client’s info confidential here] solves the problem of [PAIN POINT] to produce [SOLUTION]. Create a list of unique-sounding terms, metaphors, or analogies that use a Unique Mechanism to solve this problem.”
Oh. Oh, oh, oh. The utter DRIVEL that AI spat out.
>> The Insight X-Ray; The Brand Symphony; The Marketing GPS; The Message Whisperer; The Connection Catalyst…
Liz provides data-driven market analyses based on decades of experience working with global brand-leaders. These names would not appeal to the kind of clients she wants to attract. Virgin and Microsoft did not hire Motto Branding Worldwide for a process they call Insight Oasis.
I gave Chat GPT another chance. I described the audience and requested it “Keep going and prioritize professional, technical, intelligent terms.”
>> The Insight Genome Sequencer, The Message Data Fusion Engine, The Message Quantum Entangler, The Message Cerebral Synthesizer, The Insight Quantum Oracle…
Why does AI hate me?
Lesson Re-Learned: Coming up with a solid, appealing, audience-appropriate name for something (like a company, product, program or process) is hard and takes time. You can’t fast track the Full Creative Process (TM) (JK).
And you sure can’t “decide” to name something on a client’s behalf and stick it in their copy on a Wednesday afternoon. That’s just rude.
So two things:
I love the marketing potential of a Unique Mechanism.
An empty and ridiculous name is worse than no name at all.
I encourage you to do the hard thinking to come up with a really great name for your IP. Until then it’s fine to describe, in unpatented terms, your one-of-a-kind framework, procedure, system, protocol, regimen, technique, methodology, structure, blueprint, or approach.