I have three clients in the consumer electronics space right now that are differentiating themselves to death.
These companies have focused their marketing on smaller, peripheral features which differentiate them from the competition. So that instead of focusing their message on the 80 percent of the product or service that speaks to mainstream consumer interest, they instead focus on the 10 percent that makes them different from competition, which mostly matters internally.
Here are the problems with this approach:
- It’s somewhat paranoid, and therefore immediately defensive. Your marketing is far less effective this way.
- You assume your consumers know your products and your competitions’ products as intimately as you do.
- You assume consumers are extremely familiar with the major part of your product that you are not talking about.
- You are actually educating consumers about your competition.
How is this helpful?
I think this differentiation phenomenon is widespread in our industry. It happens for the same reason that you focus so much on technical specifications in your marketing: most consumer electronics companies construct their marketing based on what’s important to executives, internally, instead of what’s important to consumers, externally.
Focus your marketing on the main value you provide consumers. Forget about the competition (at least while formulating your outgoing communication). This will take your messaging from paranoid to optimistic, from defensive to effective.
Focus on consumers, not competition.
I would elaborate a bit and recommend focusing on the mind of the consumer and the perceptions of the competitive landscape within it. Ries and Trout taught us that marketing is a battle of positioning in the mind of the consumer. Each brand attempts to secure territory in the mind. The “territory” is the words or ideas that consumers associate with your brand. The aim is to own the words or ideas (actually, a focus on one word or idea is usually best) that are valuable and compelling, especially relative to the words or ideas that the competition owns.
There was a recent article about the toothpaste category and the ludicrous amount of different types of products. At times product companies confuse differentiation with innovation. Then confuse innovation with customer loyalty. There is no real consumer correlation between innovation, differentiation and loyalty. A lot of times in the end the consumer has no need for the new product. You can read the WSJ post here http://on.wsj.com/hO09To and our original commentary here http://bit.ly/e93Xig The drive to differentiate has marketing departments creating confusion in the aisle.
Another perspective is if you have worked in the category long enough you will see mini battles occurring on shelf between the brands which almost have nothing to do with the consumer. For instance, who can get the higher number of facings, keep up with niche product and push out other competitors, etc. While one would think that the consumer is driving change, sometimes not so.
It’s about shelf space, obtaining mass with retailers (more products, better pricing, shipping deals across category) picking up extra share points and a protectionism strategy.