Sometimes your product is not in line with what is hot at the moment. So you need to turn some heads by turning what is not so great into a benefit. You can actually aim straight at it and make something ugly into something desirable and cool.

Let’s take a new small car imported from Europe (just making it up). In this case, these imports are super dependable but butt ugly. Really ugly. How can we present “butt ugly” as a benefit? Perhaps we’ll go for the market that doesn’t want to look like they are into their image. You know the ones. They want to look unkempt but they aren’t. Holes in their jeans and they bought them that way.

Since it’s budget car, the market is likely to be the younger set. Don’t forget that lots of people, men especially, buy a car as an emotional or image purchase. So we still appeal to that emotional trigger. These are presented as headlines but they could be tag lines. Basically, these could define the content strategy tone you want to take for the website.

Examples:

#1 A car this butt ugly is bound to make you look good.

#2 Are you secure enough to own a dependable car that comes in such an ugly package?

#3 It is a chick magnet in an underdog sort of way.

All of a sudden this Barbie-sized vehicle with an outline uglier that the post Katrina suburban landscape looks cool and hip. So it’s all in the way you present it and position it. I’m not saying you can sell trash. This is supposed to be a good, dependable vehicle. You’ve just dispelled or made an excuse to enjoy or ignore the fact that it’s an eyesore.