In our Blog last Monday and in the follow-up Quick Tips, we talked about identifying your target market and your market niche. Your target market is the businesses or people you want to serve. Your market niche is what you will offer to that target market. This is a critical first step in the branding process, as branding will help build and solidify your market position.

Many entrepreneurs first starting out believe that being as inclusive as possible is the ideal strategy. Their logic is that if they target everyone who they think would like or benefit from their product or service they will find out where the strong demand is and then they can focus on that segment of the market. While an interesting concept, it is misguided! Being all things to all people (within your product and service set) is too expensive, spreads your time and focus too thin and confuses the market. The better and preferred strategy is to identify where you want to start and concentrate your effort and scare resources there.

And to do that consider the following questions:

• Do I have a high end product or service or do I have a commodity?
• Do I want to offer many products or services or do I want to concentrate on a few?
• Do I want to have a low volume high price offering or will I compete on price and target high volume?
• Am I looking for innovators and early adapters or will I target the late majority and laggards?
• Do I care who my customer is or do I only want to work with people I enjoy working with?

These questions begin to frame your target market. Think of this exercise in terms of an upside down triangle. Initially you have many options. Then you begin to better define and more clearly focus on whom you want to serve and how you want to serve them.

One small company who is in the energy business decided to focus on both a commercial market for their product and a government market. These are two very different markets, with different price sensitivities, different buying processes, and different buying decision timelines. Sales have been slow and they are yet to gain traction in either market.

Another company provides software implementation consulting. They decided to focus on one industry (healthcare) and one area within that industry (hospitals) and support one product line. Their objective is to be the best in the industry. They are and sales are strong.

Whether you are starting out or re-energizing your business, defining your target market and the niche within that market will guide your branding strategy.

Copyright 2011 Kubica and LaForest

In our February 11^th, 2010 Quick Tips we presented 3 tips on improving your brand identity. Today we add four additional points to help you differentiate your business from the competition:

1.    Determine your value statement– that is, how do you improve your client/customer’s condition? If you don’t know, your clients won’t either.

2.    Establish your uniqueness, your differentiator from your key competition? And know how to prove it?

3.    Identify what is your company best at doing? Consider your service(s) in addition to your products. Also, would your employees say the same thing? Front line employees (customer facing) can support or sabotage your message.

4.    Know and accelerate what makes you different and better than your competitors specific to building and maintaining relationships with your clients/customers? (And how do you know. Saying it doesn’t make it so.)

When you answer these questions honestly and factually and when you have the evidence to support your answers, you have just made a major step forward in differentiating yourself from you competition. Why? Because in our experience most companies do not bother to truthfully answer these fundamental questions when attempting to build and heighten their brand.

Copyright 2010 Kubica and LaForest

On Monday we addressed the concept of differentiation and how it can drive your business. Today, we offer 5 essential tips to help you start.
1. Test your value statement. That is, do peers and clients agree that it soundly represents you and how they see your business? If so, use it in all your marketing activities. We believe it is best to translate it into a tag line, such as ours, Helping execs and entrepreneurs achieve greater results through a people-centric approach, or, another example is from one of our pharma research companies, Improving profitability through product differentiation. If your value statement is not well formed and perceivable when tested, get help defining and refining how you and your product or service will improve your customer’s condition or situation.
2. Identify and use a target list (prospective buyers/clients) to guide your marketing and relationship building activities. Your target list should include: in-person contacts, phone calls, emails, internet and mail options as a means to meet and maintain target and key relationships. Attending business meetings and social events is also a good way to meet future customers.
3. Identify the microtargets within your broader target list. Work to understand why they buy (one good way to start is to ask friends who represent your microtarget group or do consumer buying research on the internet).
4. Develop a strategy from the above options to identify which ones are best suited for use with each micro-target group.
5. Then, systematically take action (for example, 3 new contacts and 3 relationship building activities per week).
Starting by differentiating yourself/your service/your brand will build a relationship platform from which clients will get to know you and start buying your products or services. Prospective buyers will begin to find you by repute. Client’s coming to you, verses you seeking them out… now that’s differentiation.
Kubica & LaFores 2010

Basic marketing tells us to differentiate. Good advice – no, great advice. Then why don’t more business people actually do it? Here’s what we find: they say they differentiate, but they really don’t.  We are awash in the business world with sameness. You cannot gain a competitive advantage if you do the same things your competitors are doing. All you can do to be different is change your price and that’s not a great strategy if you want to be successful.

Differentiation requires thought. You need to define and articulate your value clearly; by that we mean, how you/your product/your service will improve the customer’s condition.   If you are not clear on it, neither is your buyer. You need to identify potential buyers who are interested in your value. For most of us this is not broad based, it’s targeted.

In the 2004 Presidential election, marketers segmented the voters into distinct buyer personas. This is referred to as “microtargeting” in the political world. In his book – The New Rules of Marketing & PR, David Meerman Scott provides some examples of microtargeting in the 2004 Presidential election. The campaigns targeted “NASCAR Dads” (rural working class males, many of whom were NASCAR fans) and “Security Moms” (mothers who were worried about terrorism and concerned about security). They literally took millions of voters, broke them down into microtargets and designed marketing campaigns that appealed specifically to each group. Scott mentioned this because it is an excellent concept for the business world – especially the small business world.

Differentiation is a powerful tool for all businesses, especially small businesses that face strong competition. Define your value, identify your microtargets, and execute – correcting, modifying and enhancing along the way.

Copyright 2010 Kubica and LaForest