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Symbolic Focus

Determining the key messages to use to market your product is already a challenge. (See my article, "How to Formulate Marketing Messages".) Once you've decided what messages to use, you have to figure out how to instill them in the mind of the customer.

To instill messages in the mind of the customer, you must present them credibly. Merely telling the customer that your product is the highest quality or easiest to use, for example, isn't credible. To make your message credible, you can employ symbolic focus.

Using symbolic focus means picking a very specific feature or attribute of your product that is concrete and is undeniably present in your product but in no one else's. By itself, it may be of little or no value to most customers. But it exemplifies or is symbolic of the larger message you are trying to drive home.

When you employ symbolic focus, your claim is credible, because it is unique and not vague. As a bonus, if the feature is remarkable in some way, it will generate word of mouth. When you do communicate the larger message, it will be more credible.

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