They’re tempting, but they’ll suck the life right out of your campaign.

Quality – Service – Value – Integrity – Caring

They look great. They sound great. You’re sure that they’ll convince the customer that your firm, above all others, is the “the one.”

The only problem, as recently pointed out in BusinessWeek, is that those five words have come to mean absolutely nothing to an ad-saturated public.

In reality, these five attributes are all fairly fundamental business concepts. They’re not something you should be boasting about; they’re simply core competencies that all business ought to consider an operational baseline.

There are plenty of companies out there that fail at one or other of these, but why compare your own company to theirs? Proclaiming “We’re not as bad as some other companies” is no way to win a customer’s heart.

Because these keywords represent what should be basic business practices, using them in promotional materials comes across as being defensive, and nothing deflates an ad campaign as quickly as defensiveness.

Don’t believe that they’re overused? Google lists over 26 million pages that use all five of these keywords. Narrow it down to “service,” “value,” and “quality,” and you get a whopping 327 million results.

What’s the solution?

Figure out what really makes your company different. Every company thinks they’re about quality, service, etc., so if you want to stand out you’ve got to move past the bogs of trite ad-lingo and into fresh, fertile, unclaimed territory. There’s plenty of it out there!

Charles Arthur, from Guardian Unlimited released an article about the 1% rule, which uncovers some suprising statistics about users in the Web 2.0 world. Basically, only 1% of users will contribute content to an application or website while only 10% of users will comment or offer improvements. The other 89% will simply look at it. This is seen at YouTube, where there are �1,538 downloads per upload and 20m unique users per month�, and at Wikipedia, where an estimated 70% of articles are written by 1.8% of the users.

This figure may be frightening to web businesses that rely solely on user generated content or developer interaction. They’re essentially competing for a fraction of the 1% of traffic out there that’s willing to actively contribute anything to any cause. I believe this adds to the importance of reaching early adopters and technologically savvy users early in an application’s life. We�ve also noticed that active bloggers seem to play around with products and experiments a little more than the average user.

If your application isn’t driven by user created content, maybe allowing users to help out isn�t such a bad idea. Salesforce.com, for example, is experiencing success with their application sharing program, AppExchange. In order to get the builders building, they offer a share of the profits and some name recognition in exchange for applications that Salesforce users can quickly download and integrate into their workflow. It seems to be doing pretty well. Even though there are only 280 applications, tens of thousands of users have downloaded the pre-made apps. If you can somehow tap in to the 1% of your builders effectively to create content 89% of your users want, you might be on to something.

We already eat meat that’s processed in vats – chicken nuggest. If we grow a better steak using cell cultures, we could eliminate pathogens like salmonella and save tnes of millions of animals a year. Sure cultured meat isn’t natural.. but neither is the processes for creating cheese or wine – not to mention stuffing 10,000 chickens in a metal shed and pumping them with drugs.

Only 2 percent of all graded beef is considered prime by the USDA. Envionment has a huge impact on the intricacies of taste, part of the fine dining experience is tasting one steak that is tender and buttery and another that is tough but has great flavor. This would effectivly be lost to test-tube steaks.