Schlitz, saying what everyone does
This rests on one telling: a memoir, a tradition, a story someone put on record. Where the wider point has independent support, the entry says so. The specifics remain one person's account, and they should be held that way.
Around 1920, the advertising pioneer Claude Hopkins was hired by the Schlitz brewery, then struggling in the market. By his own account, he toured the brewery and was struck by the elaborate process behind the beer: the filtered air, the repeated sterilization of every bottle, the deep artesian wells, the careful steps taken to ensure purity. He asked why they did not tell people any of this. The brewers shrugged, because every brewery did the same thing, it was simply how beer was made, nothing special. Hopkins understood that what mattered was not that everyone did it but that no one had said it. He built the campaign around the ordinary process, described in vivid detail, and Schlitz climbed in the market. It is worth being honest that this story comes from Hopkins's own memoir, so the specific before-and-after claims are his telling and hard to verify independently. The principle, though, has long outlived the beer.
Whoever describes the process first owns it, even when the process is completely ordinary and shared by everyone. Schlitz did nothing its competitors did not do, but by being the first to explain the care behind the product, it made that care its own in the customer's mind. This is a quietly powerful idea for anyone with something to sell or explain: the everyday details of how you work, which feel too routine to mention because everyone in your field does them, are often invisible and impressive to the people you serve. The thing you take for granted as standard may be exactly the thing worth saying out loud, because no one else has bothered to.
The practical version is a writing exercise rather than a strategy. List the steps your business takes that feel too obvious to mention, the checks, the sourcing, the things that get redone when they are not right the first time, then ask which of them a customer has never had explained to them by anyone in your category. Those are the lines worth writing on a product page, a proposal, or a pitch. Being first to describe a shared standard is not a claim of superiority and does not need to be defended as one, which is why it survives competitors reading it and copying the wording.
The reason it keeps working after they copy it is the mere exposure effect.
Source: Claude Hopkins, My Life in Advertising, 1927, and Scientific Advertising, 1923. A memoir account, so the specifics are his own telling.
Claude Hopkins, 1927
Hopkins telling the Schlitz story himself, alongside the rest of a career built on describing the ordinary process nobody had bothered to describe. A memoir, so read the specifics as his own account.
Draw your own card. It does not take long, and it rewards taking your time.