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When it comes to capturing an audience and really selling them on your product, you can’t do much better than a demo that wows.

Think about it: what will convince you to buy one brand of dish washing detergent over another? A clever cooking show premise? The dramatic music? The voiceover?

Those are all important parts of selling your product, but when consumers see one brand of detergent cut through grease like it’s nothing versus the sticky mess left behind by another dish detergent brand, they immediately and intuitively know which is better—and that’s where their money goes.

But demos can be hard to pull off. Like anything in the marketing world (and beyond), there are good demos and bad ones.

At Upstream360, demos are one of our specialties. Through years of experience and successful demo creation for some of the world’s largest brands, our team of scientists, illustrators, and video producers have compiled the 5 principles of surprisingly intuitive demos that capture a product’s superiority and wow consumers.

5 Demo Principles

1. Unlock a “Wow” moment of magic

Zero in on a moment that elicits a feeling of “Wow!” like when Dawn instantly cuts through grease with very little scrubbing.

2. Never Seen Before Visual Imagery

Think about a transformation that occurs right before your eyes. How can we make it visually arresting, surprising and unique?

For example, Dawn’s mountain of bubbles implies superior cleaning compared to the competitor’s lack of bubbles.

3. Surprisingly Obvious

Despite providing an element of surprise, the best demos are easily understood. Metaphors are a great way to unlock the right balance between surprising and intuitive. They can spark unexpected pathways.

It’s pretty obvious: people buy Dawn to clean dishes. The surprising part? Dawn cleans 3,000 more dishes than the competition.

4. Ownable and on Equity

The demonstration should be uniquely ownable, meaning your brand and only your brand can do this. At the same time, the context, story and imagery should fit the brand’s equity.

By putting the demo within the context of a professional kitchen and cooking show, Dawn playfully shows how it wins over the competition and is preferred by the pros.

5. Communicates Superiority

Whether through side-by-side comparison, torture test, extreme context or superlative language, the demonstration should imply outright superiority.

Like the commercial says, the bigger bottle isn’t always the better value.

Dawn is a brand that has figured out how to showcase the superiority of its product through surprisingly obvious demos that wow. it’s no wonder that Dawn is the number one overall pick and the “budget-friendly gold standard that we hold others to,” according to Good Housekeeping’s 2023 dish soap rankings.

Upstream360: The Demo Experts

Upstream360 is a product communication agency that brings concepts, ideas and products magically to life through visual storytelling. We started as a demo-creation company and after decades of revising and refining our process, we’re the demo experts.

Our innovation team can take your fuzzy ideas and clarify them into demo ideas that make sense on paper and in person. Ready to hit the ground running? Our demo sprint process delivers a handful of quality demos in a shockingly short amount of time.

Not really sure where to start? Shoot us a message – our demo team is ready to wow you and your consumers!