What to do if the product’s just not differentiated
I have a client that’s in a very crowded and fragmented market space. The market is old enough to have dozens of vendors in it, but young enough not to have yet consolidated into a few big guys offering all things to all men, and the smaller, niche satellite players that will continue to plug holes that aren’t large enough for the big guys to bother with. The consolidation is starting to happen, but it will take a while.
Meanwhile, my client has a very good product. But it’s just not all that different from the products that are out there. Fortunately, we have platform differentiation, which immediately takes out about half the competitors. (Whew!) But that leaves the rest of the pack. Some of which have products with greater functionality.
What to do, what to do…
Every time we seem to turn the corner and find something that no one else has, another competitor pops up who can say the same thing.
So, what’s different about us?
We’re really wracking our brains here, but I’m coming down on the side of not making ourselves any crazier about why we’re different in any meaningful sense. (As opposed to: the “send” button is in the left hand corner of the screen, and we use red lettering types of distinctions that - admittedly - I have resorted to in the past.)
What we really need to do is just state what we’ve got, and why it’s good. Yes, we can differentiate ourselves with respect to some of the competitors. As for the rest. Forget about it!
The good news about being in a crowded space is that no one is going to evaluate all of the competitors before they make a buying decision. Just based on what we do have, the odds are that, in some buying situations, we will be different in a way that matters for the purposes at hand.
In other situations. Well, it’s going to come down to eye of the beholder - how does our application look and feel to them - or, more importantly, it’ll come down to how they feel about doing business with us. Do they like our sales guys, trust our technical support folks. Just feel more comfortable doing business with us than they do with the other guys.
Sometimes, in our frenzy to differentiate along product feature lines, we forget that a company’s processes and personality matter, too. That having a strong reference from a customer who is trusted by our prospects counts for a lot. That having a disinterested outsider mention in an article or blog post that you’ve got something interesting going might get someone to give you a more serious look than they would have.
Having a largely non-differentiated product is no reason for despair.
Just make sure to remember that it’s not just the product that you’re selling - it’s everything that surrounds it.
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Excellent point, Maureen. It’s a good reminder that what we are differentiating is not just the product, but the whole experience. Much like branding is far more than the “brand” of product. The more product offerings converge, the more essential it is to make the overall process more appealing in some meaningful way.
I think the real trick along those lines is to go beyond generic platitudes about service, etc., and really DO something that makes that difference more tangible. If you do the right things, they become larger than life through blogs, WOM, and other avenues.
Here’s a challenge: what (branded) product category in your average supermarket features the greatest parity among brands — the LEAST differentiation?
Chips? Tuna? Margarine? If you’re in B2B, at least you normally have some other channels or components involved to help make the difference!