Yvon Chouinard Quotes

You really need a unique selling proposition, and people need to care about that unique selling proposition.

No matter how skillful you are, you can't invent a product advantage that doesn't exist. And if you do, and it's just a gimmick, it's going to fall apart anyway.

A product that wants to stand out needs different treatment.

I'm always asking, 'How do you give a guy a new reason to buy a polo?'

We could be the biggest pantyhose seller in America, but we don't want to weaken the link in shoppers' minds between Home Depot and do-it-yourself projects.

A strategy delineates a territory in which a company seeks to be unique.

What is your Unique Selling Proposition? What makes you different than your competitors? Wrap your advertising message around that USP and communicate it in a clear and concise manner.

When looking at trends I always ask myself basic and timeless questions about business, and the one I seem to always come back to is, 'How is this different than anything else in the marketplace?'

I never wanted to be the face of the brand. You haven't seen me in my own ads. You don't see my logo all over my clothes. From the beginning, I wanted the clothes to stand on their own.

I can't imagine trying to operate a company banking on the fact that my logo is cooler than somebody else's logo.

My books didn't fit a marketing niche.

In a marketplace where it's so easy to produce products, where your competitors can essentially match you on the product itself, you need to have something else. You need to have an added value, and that added value is the identity, the idea behind your brand.

My general premise is not about selling clothes. If that's your end goal, then all of a sudden everything looks the same, you know - you start designing by numbers.

You have to have a unique product that Amazon just can't source. It's all about the product. Why is it important? Why is it different? Amazon are not merchants. They are technology platform guys.

Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.

The goal, then, isn't to draw some positioning charts and announce that you have differentiated your product. No, the opportunity is to actually create something that people choose to talk about, regardless of what the competition is doing.

Positioning should be decided before the advertising is created

If Nintendo asks consumers to pay more money than the other platforms, then it's Nintendo's mission to provide the added value for which the people are willing to pay. In order to do that, we must remain unique and cannot be reproduced somewhere else.

When you write like everyone else and sound like everyone else and act like everyone else, you're saying, 'Our products are like everyone else's, too.'

We basically built a pricing model that surgically identified what people wanted to pay us for and what they didn't want to pay us for. One of the things we figured out early on was that we could create value for people by creating a product that allowed them to design something that they couldn't design without us.

New things get noticed. This means you can't be afraid to present something new to your market, even if it's just a variation or an addition to an already-existing product or service.

Branding in electric mobility is critical, but I think what Tesla has also demonstrated is that you can build new brands.

Often, I'm sitting opposite a client, and I'm thinking, 'How do I convince him to not copy the best-selling product out there?' And sometimes I don't know. Really, it's smarter to be a thief.

Any brand in the world wants to make desirable product. But we don't shove it down people's throats.

Great product trumps all. You can have the biggest marketing budget, the biggest show, a perfect merchandising plan, but at the end of the day, it doesn't mean anything if the design and quality of the product you are offering is not compelling.