How to NOT Commoditize Your Business
“When everything is the same and supply is plentiful, said Greer, clients have too many choices and no basis on which to make the right choice. And when this happens, you’re a commodity.” — Thomas Freidman, The World is Flat
How do you keep your business from becoming a commodity?
Relationships.
Relationships with people.
Relationships with living, breathing, emotional, human beings who want to trust the organizations with which they purchase the products and services necessary to live the life they want to live.
Because that’s why people buy. Trust.
People want to live a better life. They want to feel good. They want to feel happy, secure, excited, safe, powerful, successful…
People buy from us because of the way our product or service makes them feel about themselves.
How does the way you sell your product or service make your client’s feel about themselves?
How we describe our product, is the filter for who buys it.
Commoditizing Your Business
We’re all working to produce more from less resources, in less time.
This exercise forces the creation of mechanical systems, more mechanical systems create less differentiation, less differentiation creates more commoditization. Eventually we find ourselves producing a product seemingly indistinguishable from your competition. Afraid that no one will will buy our indistinguishable product or service, we turn to marketing, public relations and advertising and task these departments with making our product different.
But consumers are smart. The Internet has taken away Oz’s curtain. In the modern marketplace, marketing, PR and advertising can’t differentiate our business.
The feedback loop inherent in the structure of social media has made hiding your average product behind a wall of clever marketing almost impossible.
Great business storytelling, in and of itself, doesn’t make us unique. It only amplifies the competitive advantages which already exist.
Does that make sense?
The Indistinguishable Business
I cut my teeth in marketing within the insurance industry, a family-owned and operated independent insurance agency.
An insurance agency which, from the outside, looks and feels like any of the other 36,000 independent insurance agencies in the United States.
The Northeast, where my former agency is located, has by far the densest population of independent insurance agencies in the country. From the sidewalk of that agency I could see four competitors.
All basically indistinguishable from the next.
This is only considering physical representation, not our virtual competitors GEICO and eSurance and all the other competitors selling insurance in the online space.
Insurance insiders can easily describe the difference in experience consumers face between each method of purchasing insurance.
However, most consumers are naive to the differentiation between the various options in purchasing insurance. Think about your own insurance buying experience, how much thought do you put into your car or home insurance?
One policy is as good as next, you don’t care, you just need insurance.
If you try to differentiate yourself through marketing, there is no difference.
Consumers are always going to be attracted to latest funny commercial or viral hashtag.
There is no brand loyalty… no true attention paid to what the company stands for or what the product really does. The auto insurance market has been commoditized to a generation of consumers by insurance companies trying to differentiate themselves through marketing.
The Anti-Commodity
It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of possibility that digital marketing dangles in front of our business.
Just one more Facebook post, if we spend one more on Twitter or Tumblr. What if Buzzfeed picks up our story and we go viral?
We can put lipstick on pig, but in the end we’re still just another commodity… unless we aren’t.
We don’t differentiate through marketing.
We use marketing to attract our True Fans. We become the anti-commodity in the eyes of a few, at the expense of being just another commodity product in the eyes of the many.
Our marketing tells a story aimed at consumers whose ideals mirror our own business.
Our message matches who we are with who we're looking to attract. Focus in on that small group. Acquire one True Fan, then two, then four, then a thousand…
Your business is NOT a commodity to your True Fans.
That’s how you become indistinguishable from the competition. One new relationship with one True Fan at a time.
Ryan Hanley is the Managing Editor of Agency Nation and the author of Content Warfare: How to find your audience, tell your story and win the battle for attention online.
