One of my favorite ads running on television right now are from State Farm. Think about this: there are at least four national insurance companies that are fighting over “low cost:” Progressive, Gieco, Allstate, eSurance. If you see one of their ads, you are being pitched with the ubiquitous “save time and money.”

But not State Farm. They have delivered a series of ads that hint that you may not always be getting what you are buying. In the example below, the hot dog vendor sells hot dogs, but no bun. Others spots have popsicle, no stick; a car wash, no rinse; a shoe shine, but not shoes shine (he only does one). In other words, price isn’t everything. It may be worth paying a little more to make sure you get what you want.

I bring this up because it can be so easy to argue on points your competition brings up, especially when the point (such as spending money) is important to your potential customers. This is, of course, very dangerous because you are now fighting against your competition’s strengths.

We (i.e., Aperio Marketing) just as guilty of of falling into this trap as anyone. We offer email marketing services. Our prices are very competitive, but not as good as Constant Contact, which does a great job of being the low cost provider for email marketing.

Through Constant Contact you can do email newsletters and awareness campaigns at an incredibly low cost. And what’s one of the first conversations we have with new prospective customers? The price. We cannot win that conversation. Despite the fact that email marketing is inexpensive in general, we’re just not the absolute least expensive option.

What should we be doing instead? We need to be better at discussing things we do better than Constant Contact. We need to educate people that email newsletters and awareness campaigns aren’t the sum total of email marketing. Email marketing should also include informative, useful emails, such as appointment reminders, birthday or anniversary messages, or personalized, custom content based on their job title or industry. It should also allow you to track when and what campaigns drove people to sign up for your emails, so you can determine how best to use your resources. And we rarely get to discuss our superior customer service — mostly because we don’t ever bring it up. Instead, we just head in to a discussion on a topic we can’t win: price.

Obviously, we have something to learn from the State Farm campaign. I thought I would share with one of our failings as a company so that, hopefully, you too will be better able to fight the right battles. As promised, here’s the hot dog spot. Enjoy!