Get better ROI by building your brand around what you do better than your competitors.
Many companies make the mistake of failing to differentiate their product from their competitors. If you’re not communicating what you do best, your target audience will have no reason to choose your offering. If you don’t give them a clear reason to choose your offering, they’ll choose an offering that does. And if they think your offering is of the same value and quality as all others in your category, they’ll simply pick the cheapest one.
To maximize the effectiveness of your communications, you need to discover your offering’s distinguishable characteristic that causes it to eclipse other available alternatives. Then you need to build your brand, marketing and all other communications around this point of difference.
Here are three steps to stand out in the marketplace:
- Discover – Conduct an objective analysis of your product’s benefits. Determine which unique aspects of your product address genuine market interests, opportunities or needs.
- Develop – Craft all your communications toward achieving awareness of the unique benefit consumers only get when they use your product.
- Reinforce – Deliver on this benefit every time consumers come into contact with your name, product, staff or marketing.
Using these principles, we recently developed a campaign for Fres-co®, a packaging supplier. One of the main things that separates Fres-co from their competitors is their single source approach to packaging – giving manufacturers the cost-savings and convenience benefits of getting all their packaging needs from one company.
Recognizing the growing opportunities in the single serve coffee market, we developed this ad to reinforce Fres-co’s value – giving coffee manufacturers a very good reason to choose Fres-co.
To see some more samples of distinctive communications we’ve developed for our clients, click here.
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This is one of my pet peeves! Far too many times a client simply cannot articulate why his or her product/service/company is different from the competition, let alone better. Usually I end up asking them why they started the business – sometimes the answer is more revealing.
But even more frustrating is when a client finally does provide a point of difference, then backs away when they see it in print. Suddenly they are afraid to hang their hat on that one point and insist on retreating to an “all things to all people” position.
The sad thing is that, when a client does commit to marketing their single, unique point of difference, they get awesome results. Makes you wonder why more companies won’t follow suit.
Great article!