Marketing Comet - Small Business Marketing Secrets

How to Compete with Dove (Or Other National Brands)

A nice woman named Rhea Brown wrote me and asked if I would write an article about competing with a national brand like Dove. She sells a line of 100% natural products that include things like Organic Shea Butter.

I think that her question is a good one and I will offer several pieces of advice. Even if you aren't in the beauty products business, pay attention - there are probably a couple gems in here for you too:

Realize That Your Target Market Is Different:
OK, everybody buys soap, and Dove is one of the top selling brands in the US. However, there is a separate, smaller, but profitable market that is willing to pay a premium for natural or organic products.

If you can show a valuable difference in your product you can actually charge a premium for your products. While you may not be able to capture the market share of a billion-dollar branding organization like Unilever, you can have a higher profit-margin per product.

Think About Your Brand
Some successful brands that come to mind are Burt's Bees and Tom's of Maine. These products are carried at many health food stores and even some regular grocery stores and gift stores. These brands sell to people who want to avoid unnatural chemical beauty products. They both have a "modern hippie" orientation.

Another way you can go with the brand is pure luxury. Think about selling your products through Spas, boutiques or other luxury locals. a|MEN|ity is a brand of natural men's having products sold through boutiques and at Barney's New York.

Branding is all about difference and clarity. What makes you products different and meaningful? Now everything you do from packaging to copy must reflect that.

Remember that the price you can charge for your product has a lot to do with branding. Why are a pair of Nike shoes, made in the same sweatshops in China as other brands, able to command such a high price. Nike has branded itself as an elite product synonymous with success, power, and importance.

Position Correctly
If you do your job correctly, you will not be in competition with national brands. Leave them to the masses. Unless you have a few hundred million dollars in your marketing budget - you won't be in the same league for a while.

Starbucks started as  a quirky, hippie, environmentally sound, youth-oriented brand. Their prices were higher than other coffee shops, and much higher than brewing a brand at home. They penetrated their market and offered a significantly different product (they have nearly double the caffeine content of other coffees).

Use Guerrilla Marketing Tactics:
If I had a beauty product to sell, here are a few things I might do to get the word out.

• Develop a "media kit" or info packet about the product that can go out to the media or interested buyers
• Get the product into the hands of every beauty editor for every magazine in the country
• make sure to clip and copy every positive thing written about your product to use as a sales tool
• Send free samples along with wholesale order forms to the owners of upscale boutiques and salons
• Have a web site / blog / and e-newsletter that offers free beauty tips. Make sure to capture customer information through an opt-in form.
• Find bloggers that write about health and beauty and get samples with info packets to them
• Go to conventions, hair shows, etc. as an exhibitor. This is one of the best ways to get in front of buyers.
• Focus on a word of mouth campaign. Run a promotion on your web site where if somebody buys one unit you will ship another unit free to a friend.

These are just a few of the tactics I would use to get the product known and in front of as many people as possible.

With a little ingenuity, competing with a national brand is unnecessary. Ultimately you create your own market of loyal customers.

J D Moore - Marketing Comet

How To Write Your Positioning Statement

Positioning is another one of those fluffy marketing words that many people don't get. This is unfortunate because it's an important concept.

Positioning is the activity of describing and promoting your unique place in the market. Your position is composed of what you do, who you do it for, and what makes you unique.

Think about the soap market. You've got Dove (the most popular brand in the world), Irish Spring, Ivory. Dove's position is that it is THE soap that is 1/4 moisturizers, so it makes people's (mostly women's) skin softer. Irish Spring is a strong deodorant soap that makes you fresh as an Irish stream and is mostly used by men. Ivory's brand is about purity and its position is that it is 99% pure, and a bit old-fashioned.

Your positioning statement is part of your branding. It's like a mission statement and acts like a blueprint that you use to inform your activities. It guides who you serve, how you serve them, and what makes you different and desirable. If you can't articulate a clear positioning statement, you'll have trouble getting through to your customers.

This is not to say that your positioning statement has to be public knowledge. Again it's a blueprint for your marketing activities. It describes the impression you want to make on your customers.

I have been hesitant to write about positioning statements before because I haven't found a really good model that works for everybody. While a positioning statement may be very simple, cutting to the essential core of your position can be difficult.

I found an article here that outlines a good process for working on your positioning statement.

The model is:

For (target market) (brand name)  is the ( product/service description) that (benefit) because it has (reason why.)

I guess I like his model because it pretty closely matches my own positioning statement:

I help small businesses who are frustrated with their marketing results rapidly double or triple their profits

so you have:

[brand name] I [ target market] small businesses frustrated with their marketing results [benefit] rapidly double or triple their marketing results.

OK, so I'm missing a couple components in this model. My positioning statement is scaled back so that I can deliver it verbatim as an elevator pitch. I do know what my services are, and have proof to back up my claims if I need it.

A good exercise is to run familiar brands, products, or companies through this model. Let's do Dove Soap:

For American women aged 25-45 (I don't know if this is their actual target age, I'm just guessing) Dove is the soap that softens skin because it has 1/4 moisturizing lotion.

Have some fun with this, try to make up positioning statements for companies you know.

Your own positioning statement may be more than a single sentence. You may have several target markets, several key benefits, and lots of reasons why. If you provide several products or services to multiple markets each one may have its own positioning statement.

J D Moore - Marketing Comet

An Interesting Positioning Attempt

Defending the Caveman is a one man show by Rob Becker which plays on the differences between men and women. One premise: men are hunters and bond through activity where women are gatherers and bond through social interaction.

Over the past few weeks I have heard some radio commercials which start with a short monologue by Becker and then describe "the first TV designed for both men and women." Hmmmm, I say, an interesting positioning statement. It's great to be the first.

I don't remember the name of the TV or the manufacturer, so I don't know how well the radio commercial worked. I've heard the thing probably 7 times. The commercial talks about color depth for her and clear action so he can enjoy sports better. This might work, but it seems like a stretch.

Personally I don't buy the premise that there's a TV out there that uniquely meets the needs of both my wife and I. She likes The Gilmore Girls and I like Stargate Atlantis. However, I am a focus group of one and maybe the manufacturer is on to something. Maybe the company did tons of research and found that women across the country pined for better color depth. Maybe men complain about a lack of clear focus while watching sports. Or, maybe the marketing team came up with a desperate yet creative way to position the set.

For my dollars, marketing is about uniquely meeting needs. If you produce a commodity - find a way to truly make it unique and market that. I visited a coffee shop in Maine recently called the Mad Monkey Cafe. They have great coffee imported from Mexican growers - the money goes directly to the farmers. The cafe has a big screen TV with an X-box and PlayStation 2 hooked up. There are board games everywhere, notebooks for people to draw in and leave notes, and computers connected to the Internet. The crowd is quite young, mostly high-school and younger. They have a very unique position and fill a need (a cool, safe, fun place for young folks to hang out). Instead of creating another biscotti-slinging cafe - they have something really exciting.

Legal Seafood is a popular upscale seafood chain in the Boston area. Their positioning strategy revolves around the quality of their fish. They have their own laboratory at the docks to ensure their food exceeds government standards. Their clam chowder is served at every presidential inauguration. Their brand is about quality and exclusivity - fish that other restaurants will serve won't make it to Legal Seafood. Because they have built their brand consistently around this position, they are extremely successful, and can charge a premium for their food. It's not the most expensive restaurant in town, but it certainly isn't the cheapest.

What's your positioning strategy?  Think unique, relevant, and superlative. What are you the best at in your area, or in the world? Why is that important to your customer?

J D Moore - Marketing Comet

How Not To Differentiate In Small Business Marketing

Imagine if Ford tried to differentiate its cars from Toyota by removing one wheel and the windshield from every car. What would that do to the number of cars they sell every year?

"But being different is important!" whine the marketers with just enough knowledge to be dangerous. Wrong. Being different in a meaningful and valuable way is important.

Being different by not meeting customer expectations is very bad. Instead, be different by exceeding customer expectations. If you are in a field with a lot of competition you have to do at least what your competitors are doing and exceed what they do in a few key areas.

Can you differentiate with stripped down service? Sure, there are some exceptions. Unfinished furniture stores, pick your own apple orchards, classic car kits are a few examples. A major selling point for these businesses is the do-it-yourself component that some people enjoy. However, I don't think a sign reading, "Pick your own rotten apples" would probably land too many customers.

Ill never forget a time where I went to a pub with some friends for dinner. I tried to order a Coke, "we don't have that," said the waitress. Pepsi is OK, "no we just have some other brand of cola." Well what is it? "I don't know its something else and the tap isn't labeled."

If you own a restaurant in the US and you make the risky decision to not sell Coke, Pepsi, or Diet Coke, the top three selling carbonated beverages in the US, you had better offer something amazing. You had better train your waitress to sell me on how delicious your cola is. She had better know the name and why its so much better than Coke or Pepsi.

If you are really original and open up a business with no direct competitors your marketing still needs to point out how you are different from alternatives. If I am the first person to open a karaoke bar in my home down that doesn't mean I have no competition. I am competing against all the other choices people can make for entertainment including staying home and watching TV, going to a non-karaoke bar, or doing nothing at all. Moving people outside their comfort range to try a totally new service can be difficult.

You should be looking at all of your competitors marketing materials and advertisements. Make a list of every feature, benefit, claim, offer, and promise made by every competitor. Then look at what features, benefits, claims, offers, and promises you can make that your competitors don't.

Find out what's important to your customers by talking to them. Small businesses usually don't have the budget to run focus groups, but you can learn a lot by having frank conversations with your customers. One of the best questions you can ask is, "what are the main reasons you choose to do business with us?"

Then you are well on your way to being meaningfully different.

J D Moore - Marketing Comet
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