How To Be Special, or, 5 Rephrased Snippets of Common Marketing Knowledge.

Stand Out

You have to specialize to be special. Some business leaders want to be everything to everyone, and though your broad knowledge and abilities are admirable, you risk alienating some clients who rightly think that they are also special.  Go back to basics for each market and define your presence in a clear and substantial way.  What you can do to optimize billing is less important than what you can do to help patient billing, which is not as interesting as what you can do to help patient billing for community hospitals with about 100-200 beds when you are talking to a decision maker in a hospital that size.  You may need all three layers for your sales process, but the last one is the most important.

Know your audience. A played out mantra for marketing, but it is always important.  Part of specializing is narrowing your focus and consequently, narrowing your audience.  Describe in detail the things you do best before targeting audiences that are new to you.  By having well targeted, well substantiated messaging you will have more effective responses because you will be more relevant every time.  If you are targeting a new audience, you need to develop some understanding of that audience and convey to them that you understand.  When you know your audience, you will know what options they have available to them, what things they would like to see, and, consequently, what you have to offer them.

Relevance prompts attention. You cannot hold your prospects hostage.  They will not listen to what you want to talk about; they will listen to what they want to hear.  Make sure you are resonating with your audience by answering a question or answering a need.  If you are not needed, you are not special.  You might be different even if you are not needed, but I want you to be special (nothing personal, but it is better for our society and economy if businesses all put in the effort to be at least a little special.)

Listen. If you don’t know why a prospect would prefer you over someone else, then you have to seek out the opportunity.  The great thing about the modern customer is, they do everything for you.  With the right communications mechanisms in place, you can have the community perform your product development, message definition, feedback gathering, prospect vetting, prospect nurturing, and possibly even promotions.  The key is opening up the proverbial door to stick out your proverbial head and see what is being said.  By door of course I mean online community and by head I mean your marketing department.  Well… you get the picture.  When you know what the community has and what the community wants, you can better strategize how you will uniquely meet them (or better yet, surpass their needs.)

Process, process, process. Creativity is great; it is how I make my living.  However, creativity is not spontaneous and innovative companies that execute strategy poorly should not expect good results.  In my last post I mention the basic costs of doing business (good customer service, friendly faces, reliable products) and these cannot be ignored when trying to be special.  Sort of a Maslow’s need hierarchy for business (in fact I think I remember business school having something just like that… just don’t remember what it was called), an innovative business will fail if it does not perform the basic tasks of business well.  A great product that takes 12 weeks to receive will discourage most consumers.  A great idea for marketing is relatively useless without seeing how it will fit into the sales cycle.  Having a process means having a plan, and having a plan is the logical beginning and end to any strategy.  By knowing your process, you will know what needs to be done and how to ensure that your special status (or “specialosity” as I choose to call it for now) is not lost in the shuffle.

The Importance of Being Special

Competition is the great motivator for modern business. It drives efficiency and innovation. It keeps price in check and hands control over to the customer. How much true competition is there when the contest in your industry is between marketing constructs?

Certain industries are doomed to commoditization. Marketing assembles some differentiators through a combination of good customer service, reliable quality, and just plain friendly and personable brand representatives. As a marketer, I don’t mean to marginalize the importance of these things, but in reality, every company is trying to do this (or should.) These factors are not the metrics of real competition; they are the minimum requirements of doing business.

Proof in nature exists for brand differentiation (if I can be so absolutist about it.) The blood orange, or Moro Orange, I think is the easiest to identify among a bowl of oranges, and holds the most mystique for its differences. When every other orange is, well, orange and tastes like a variation of an orange, a blood orange is a linguistic paradox and sometimes carries a slight flavor of raspberry with it. In this case, the differentiation is manifested in a special personality when compared to “peers’, but it all relates to nuanced differences in the core makeup of the orange.

Moro Orange

Going back to business, this is where a brand like Virgin gets it and a brand like Northwest doesn’t. One competes on price alone and relies on its marketing messages to make something happen. The other tries to make flying a different experience through nuance and process, using marketing messages to communicate the real differences between one experience and the other. If a consumer decides to fly on Virgin, the price is not necessarily the factor that pushed the decision, but that is where Northwest is competing.

Whether a core message of the brand or the subject line of an email, poor differentiation not only won’t sell your audience, it will likely annoy your audience. I remember going to a booth at the AIIM tradeshow and asking someone to tell me about his company. He said they were a “solutions provider for marketing” and I responded with, “sure likes like you specialize in printing on some interesting substrates to me.” My time was wasted with the misdirection in their message, and I would much have preferred a frank answer to my question. Everyone is a solution provider. That tagline “Solutions for You” would fit under any logo because it is as ambiguous as the English language allows.

So here is my point: paying attention to differentiation starts in planning your business. Messaging can paint a picture, but it cannot make something ordinary into something special (and of course lying will set you back further than being ordinary will.) Focusing on innovation is obviously one “Blue Water” tactic that will keep you not only competitive, but maybe unique. Being unique, however, is fleeting. We will see the uniqueness of the iPhone fade as real competitors move in, and then it will be back to what makes the iPhone different. Apple is surely an example of one company that constantly asks, “why us?” Why should anyone do business with you?

You might be unique for a year or two, but you need to refresh your brand constantly to be any sort of a leader in your industry. If you can’t answer the “why us” question every few weeks, or if your answer doesn’t change, then you may have been left behind and, worst of all, you may not realize it yet.

I don’t think you need drastic and constant changes to jar your stakeholders awake every few months. Change can probably be done to scale. Apple has set a high bar for change, making uniqueness a core element of the brand, but Apple is also a global leader focused on growth. A local restaurant might focus on smaller changes like seeking local suppliers to identify with the growing number of locavores.

To summarize: Consumer expectations have risen and differentiators must be real in the modern marketplace. Don’t count on success to come out of crafting your message more cleverly than your competitor. If you can’t be direct and have a frank conversation with your audience, then perhaps you should revisit your core strategy.