Perhaps the most common trend in writing value propositions is to bury the main value or function of your product in place of a more ambiguous slogan or tag line. 

Brands bury the real value in place of cutesy slogans and use subheads to clarify meaning.

If you need a modifier, you’ve written a bad value proposition. Ambiguity doesn’t lead to a sale. 

When it comes to conversions, there’s nothing more dangerous than the idea of measuring ourselves against the averages. 

For benchmarking purposes, it’s fine, but in most cases we use it as a ceiling that we need to reach rather than one to break through and destroy. 

Truth be told, this is the advertisement that sparked the idea for this series on copy in the wild. 

My girlfriend, Kelly, had gotten us Yankee/Red Sox tickets for my birthday a month ago, and we decided to spend the whole weekend in the city. 

Following a rough loss on an otherwise beautiful day in the Bronx, we were headed back toward midtown to meet some friends for drinks and forget about the six hitless innings we just sat through.  

After spending the better part of the sweaty subway trip from Yankee Stadium to Grand Central staring at the above advertisement, I finally thought to myself, “what does this copy even mean? And..who’s hand is touching my thigh?"

So how good do you think your memory is? 

Can’t recall? (Poorly executed joke, but I had to.)

Let’s have a little fun and find out.

Take twenty seconds and try to remember as many of the following words as possible. When you’re finished, jot them all down somewhere. Ready? 

Let me start off by telling you something you already know: convincing people to choose you is hard work.

(I mostly mean in business, but take it as you will. It works in any context.)

The act of being chosen is completely out of your hands. And boy, as marketers, do we hate that. 

People are freakin’ complex, and their decision-making mechanisms even more so. Where most marketers go wrong is in their effort to counter these mechanisms rather than work within their confines. 

So while the act of being chosen is out of your hands, positioning yourself to be chosen is not.

But before you can do that, there are a few things you need to know.