Differentiate or Die - ReachForce Book Club
As I went back to Chapters 1 and 2, I immediately remembered what stood out most for me. Page 4. I hadn’t read Differentiate or Die, Survival In Our Era of Killer Competition by Jack Trout with Steve Rivkin. So this was all new stuff for me.
The summary started with out with some very interesting numbers on grocery store SKUs, interesting but not really applicable to my B2B Marketing job. I got to the next page (page 4) and this sentence jumped out at me. “Those that don’t stand out will get lost in the pack.”
I went on to read…”Indeed, companies must address differentiation in three key ways:
- If you ignore your uniqueness and try to be everything to everybody, you quickly undermine what makes you different.
- If you ignore changes in the market, your difference can become less important.
- If you stay in the shadow of the larger competitors and never establish your “differentness,” you will always be weak.”
Differentiate ourselves and highlight our uniqueness, we all get that I’m sure. But how? Here’s an example of how we “went different” to stand out. ReachForce business cards not only have the typical contact info. on them but they also include a few points that describe that person’s ROLE at ReachForce. This helped reinforce our role vs. title messaging and was a great conversation starter when meeting new people and exchanging cards.
Anyone have other cool “stand out” stories to share with the group? Or anything else from the first 2 book summaries that stood out for you?
One Response to “Differentiate or Die - ReachForce Book Club”
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May 13th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
I think as marketers we have to differentiate ourselves with every initiative we take on. Whether it is our website or a new email, we have to find a way to stand out. We don’t always get a say in our product’s differentiation, but we can make our message stand out. With the over abundance of email, not including SPAM, maybe direct mail is the answer. Direct mail too expensive, then take a look at your subject line and headers so that your email doesn’t look like everyone else’s. Maybe we invest in long-tail Google AdWords to increase our click-to-conversion rates. Everyday our prospects are being inundated with marketing messages, our goal, as B2B Marketers, is to make them listen to ours. If you dare to be different, you may just get a big payout in the end.