Several years ago, there was a TV commercial here in US for a diet pill called “Leptoprin”.
It started out with a question, "When is a diet pill worth $153 a bottle?” and then the woman looked at the camera and said, “When it works!"
Their USP was "Leptoprin is the most powerful weight-loss formula. It's far too powerful for the casual dieter with five or ten vanity pounds to lose. But if you have 20 or 30 pounds you want to get rid of, then you need Leptoprin.”
I don’t believe there was anything different or special about the ingredients in that pill to justify the price of $153 per bottle. But it sold like crazy.
And you know why?
Because Leptoprin was positioned specifically to target people who tried the $29, $39, $49 bottles and never got any results. So now they’d think, "No wonder those didn't work. This is the real stuff. This is what I need."
Then, a year or so later, I was watching TV again, and this other commercial came on.
It started out with the same Leptoprin intro, “When's a diet pill worth $153 a bottle? When it works!” But then it zoomed out, showing a woman looking at you saying...
"She's right. Leptoprin is the most powerful weight-loss formula. But now, thanks to the folks at Generix Labs, you don't have to pay $153 a bottle. Now there's Leptopril. And you can get it for only $53!”
I remember thinking, what a brilliant idea to mirror the pharmaceutical approach for the positioning. First, there's a company with a new product having the monopoly and high prices, and then here comes the generic with the same formula for less money. And I thought, "The only thing that would make this better is if it was the same company.”
So, I started looking into it.
Turns out, it was the same company all along!
What's more, that company owned a myriad of other diet pills on the market. For all kinds of situations. There was Estrin-D for the needs of menopausal women. Then there was Thyrin-ATC for people with undiagnosed underactive thyroid… and so on.
Now, think about what they were doing...
Ethics aside, they're segmenting their market by attracting all the friction, all the reasons people think why they can't lose weight. And then, they position their product around those objections.
For all we know, (and highly likely), there’s just one diet pill with just one formula. But they're specifically saying that this is for menopausal women. This is for you if you think you have a thyroid issue. And this is for you if you want to lose weight quickly, with the most powerful formula.
Different objection, different positioning, same product.
And that’s the formula for your Profit Activator One, when you’re selecting your single target market.
Start by finding the main reasons people believe why they can’t get results. And then position your product or service as the sure-fire solution to that.