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Friday, October 22, 2004
YOUR BUSINESS: David Vazdauskas
Consumer needs often get lost in rush to create unique products
Copyright © 2004 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc. | ||||||
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It's getting harder and harder to stand out in the crowd. New competitors are invading your turf, fresh technologies threaten your market share - and now you're competing with a rising economic superpower from halfway around the globe. So you keep trying to be different. A new product feature, a new ad campaign, some new packaging and, gulp, a new tagline - anything that will scream NEW and DIFFERENT! Isn't that what marketing in America is about? Now along come two Europeans who say that, as marketers, we've got it all wrong. Patrick Barwise, a professor at London Business School, and Sean Meehan, a professor at the Institute for Management Development in Switzerland, are bandying about the argument that our push to be different - to compete based on "uniqueness" - is actually a load of bunk. In a recent article in the MIT Sloan Management Review, these academics argue that our obsession with uniqueness has distracted us from listening to our customers and delivering what they actually need. "Every company serious about customer focus should aim to be the best at the things that matter most to customers," they write. Bravo to our European friends. They're absolutely, spot-on, right. How did marketing and branding turn into a hype-fest? Somehow, even though most dot-coms have died, their spirit of hype lives on and has overtaken even the most traditional industries. Do customers really want - or need - the 35th feature added to their cell phone service? Do they shift loyalty to a bank that offers a new 6 1/2-month certificate of deposit? I can't help but think of advice a baseball coach gave me when I was a brash - but naïve - high school freshman pitcher. I spent a lot of time working on novelty pitches - the knuckleball curve, the split-fingered fastball, anything that I thought would confound hitters. My coach sat me down and told me there were only two pitches I needed to be successful - an overpowering fastball and a good curveball. Everything else, he said, would mess me up more than the hitters. He was right. And though I never did develop that overpowering fastball, I'd like to think my coach's advice plays out pretty well in the marketing world. As a brand strategist, I do a lot of work for clients involves helping them to position - or reposition - their brand. Positioning is all about attaching benefits to the brand that correspond to customers' greatest needs. It's that simple. Yet it's often the point when all hell breaks loose. It's so tempting to want to be everything to everyone. Luckily, it doesn't take long to figure out that "being everything" is costly and demands far too many company resources. So we go from "being everything" to "being different." And in that paring down process, important brand attributes are pushed aside in favor of promoting more exotic benefits or new products and features - all in the name of standing out in the crowd. Technology companies are especially drawn by the lure of "uniqueness." The pace of innovation is such that as more and more becomes possible, only a small percentage of the possible is actually demanded by customers. Just because we can doesn't mean we should. And too often, "feasibility" studies pay an inordinate amount of attention to manufacturing and performance measures rather than to answering the question, "Will this improvement cause users to switch brands?" Perhaps more feasibility studies - and the development grants that fund them - should encourage innovators to start their development process by exploring an important market need - and then figuring out which innovation will meet this need - rather than starting with the new technology and exploring whether there is sufficient demand. Your company's success depends on your ability to get customers to switch from another brand to yours. And customer loyalty is driven not by whether a company continually stimulates its customers with new bells and whistles (in fact, many customers consider this onslaught an annoyance), but by how the company delivers on important customer needs: flawless and responsive service, products that work, services that do what they say they will, on time. Will a competitor with a "unique" product feature or unusual advertising get customers to switch from a brand that flawlessly delivers the basics? Perhaps. Until, of course, your competitor offers that feature too. Customers who are attracted to new features or "special low rates" are often the least loyal and least profitable. By positioning your brand as the "unique" player in an industry, you'll be sure to attract the tire-kickers, the price-shoppers and the wanna-be-the-first-to-have-one crowd. So before venturing into the land of uniqueness, take a fresh look at whether your brand aggressively communicates its ability to meet your customers' most important and basic needs - an approach that may be quite innovative after all.
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