I was at a drugstore standing before the vitamin shelves the other day. There are hundreds of bloody vitamin options. It got me thinking about how these various vitamin companies differentiate themselves and how that applies to non-vitamin-providing organizations, too.
(To be fair, one vitamin bottle caught my attention. In large text, it read "Chillax." But I will get back to that in a minute.)
Vitamin companies are not the only ones that struggle to differentiate themselves. One of our podcast listeners wrote in with a business pickle, asking how to differentiate their offering and experience from the competition. So, I thought we would talk about this here, too, because many of you probably are wondering the same thing. ]
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Differentiation is a funny thing. It is hard to figure it out when you are too close to something. You focus on what you know about it instead of why what you know matters to other people.
For example, Vitamin B12 has many exciting attributes. Known also as Cobalamin, it is critical to forming red blood cells, metabolic rate for cells, and your nerve function. Also, it aids in producing your DNA. The recommended dose is about 2.4 micrograms for adults, per the Mayo Clinic. It is rare for people in the US to have a B12 deficiency, but some do, particularly those who don't eat meat or older people who do not absorb nutrients like they used to. These people might want a vitamin supplement.
Several vitamin companies offer B12 vitamins. But will those various manufacturers have a differentiating factor that attracts buyers to choose their bottle over the one next to it?
Probably not. B12 is the same, regardless of its bottle.
So, to differentiate, the vitamin companies would need to get outside of their bottle and more into the vitamin experience.
I mentioned earlier that one of the vitamin companies caught my attention. It was the one with the big Chillax on it. For those unfamiliar with the vocabulary, Chillax combines the words "chill" and "relax." It means to calm down. So, that bottle wasn't selling the vitamin to me; it was selling what the vitamin was going to do for me.
The Five Rules to Differentiate Your Experience
In anticipation of this discussion on the podcast, we came up with five rules. So, here they are:
- Different means different, not "just a bit" different.
- Be innovative and disruptive.
- Define the Who and the How Much.
- Define the What.
- Experience is the hardest to copy.
Let's take a close look at each of these:
Rule #1: Different means different, not "just a bit" different.
I started here because it is essential to note that it's not about copying others and making slight changes around the edges of the offering. This problem also happens when organizations adopt some best practices for their industry. If everyone does the same best practices, there is less to differentiate. Sure, it gets you up to the level of the other players in your industry, but it is not an innovation strategy.
For example, if the B12 vitamins you have at .001 percent purer than the others, that's great. However, it's hard to get excited about that for most people. Leading with that in your branding strategy is too hard for people to understand the significance. So, it's not different enough.
The danger is if you just do the little bits, somebody can quickly come along and copy them. They're not going to give you a significant change.
Rule #2: Be innovative and disruptive.
Significant improvements often come from outsiders to a given area of business. They come in with a new approach to business as usual. Usually, this occurs after commoditization has made it challenging to be that different from the competition due to participating in a mutually agreed-upon market structure. Instead of disrupting, the players are all chasing little differences with these spaces.
Competitors knock down the wall, which has become a barrier to differentiation. The book Blue Ocean Strategies makes this argument, too. Companies can limit their thinking by competing in the same ways firms always have.
We think more companies should think like Lego (and you thought we were going to say Apple…). They have a plastic brick; it doesn't even have a patent anymore, so anyone can produce it. Talk about commoditization. However, they have differentiated that experience, and people pay a lot for it.
One of the ways you can disrupt or innovate is to personalize things. Business has discussed personalization for ages, but most organizations still don't. However, personalizing the experience with those small things makes a big difference.