The Original Competitor of the Calculator was the Pencil

This product is revolutionary!  This will change the world!  You have never seen, touch, felt, smelled, tasted anything like this!  It's so good your sixth sense will like it!  Completely unlike anything else on the market.

I write a few weeks ago about Guy Kawaski's interview with Mike Arrington, on web 2.0 and the like, and Mike said it perfectly when he said to stop using cheap adjectives.  Why waste a word?  Interesting, unlike, and innovative don't mean anything.  Just tell me what your product does.  If i write my own story about it...that'll be worth talking about.

Seth Godin points to vacuum cleaners, more so a copycat vacuum cleaner, which claims to be 'unlike any other vacuum cleaner on the market.'  Why not just say what it is?  'A vacuum the sucks better than any other in its price range...easy to clean too!'  That's all I want from a vacuum anyways.

My best example of this:  Flipping through a business week a few months ago, I saw an add for some type of specialty Gin.  I wish I could remember it and will do my best to go back and find the magazine.   The ad was a simple side bar, and it showed some sort of national gin rankings, and the number 1 gin in the three categories.  The gin advertised was the #1 smooth gin.  It was not the most flavorful...or the best dry.  It showed its competitors winning in those categories.  It did not pretend that it was the best gin you've ever had, or a gin unlike any other.  It was, however, rated as a top tier smooth gin.  They then asked you (the smooth gin-wanting consumer) to try their gin, and then gave a description of it (flavors, oak barelling etc)  This was a great ad.  I call this non-marketing advertising.

It's a shame I can't stand gin, otherwise, I probably would've tried this (and they certainly weren't marketing to me anyways). 

How the original calculators, which were actually revolutionary, could have advertised: 'we take the paper and the brain out of basic math calculations,' This acknowledges that, despite actually changing the way something is done, they do have a competitor: the pencil.