book.chapter Current market challenges

In the quest to stand out from the crowd, you might be drawn to three strategies: creating a superior product, offering the lowest prices, or providing exceptional customer service. However, in reality, only the service strategy proves to be effective. The notion of a "better" product is too subjective to be useful, and being the cheapest is always a fleeting advantage. Your main differentiator should be service - if you can offer your customers a unique experience, you will not only differentiate your business but also achieve distinction. These differentiation destroyers are not just applicable at the corporate level, but also in individual careers. Whether you're part of a large corporation, running your own business, or building your career, the threat of losing distinction is real. Copycat competitors will emerge, and if you try to mimic them, you lose your unique appeal in the eyes of your customers. You might think your product is superior, but from your customer's perspective, this might not be the case. To get ahead, you might attempt to be faster and cheaper than everyone else. However, there will always be someone somewhere who can undercut your prices. This is a race you cannot win in the long run. You might take pride in treating your customers so well that they wouldn't consider going elsewhere. While this might be true, complacency can set in with familiarity. Ask yourself: "What has changed in your approach to customers in the past year?" If you're honest, you're likely only making incremental improvements, if any. The cumulative effect of these factors is that you or your organization probably appear indistinguishable from your competition from the customer's perspective. You're likely stuck at the "sameness" level. If you can exhibit traits that set you apart from your competitors, you can ascend to the differentiation level - at least until your competitors replicate what you're doing, which they inevitably will. The real key is to transcend differentiation and achieve distinction status. When you accomplish this, customers perceive you as the clear market leader. So, how do you become distinguished? Traditional wisdom suggests three paths: build a better product and let the market flock to you, target a specific price point - either offer the lowest prices or have a high-end product that is demonstrably superior and therefore worth a premium, or provide more service - which doesn't just mean treating customers better. Everyone will be trying to treat their customers well. To achieve distinction, you have to treat customers uniquely so you essentially become a "category of one" in their minds. To position yourself at the distinction level and stay there, your primary source of differentiation must be delivering superior customer service. You have to do whatever it takes to create a customer experience that sets you apart from everyone else. And then you must gear up to deliver that experience consistently well week in and week out. "When people, from their perspective, are inundated with indistinguishable choices, they perceive a product, service, approach, or experience with a specific point of differentiation to be superior." - Scott McKain This concept is actually quite reassuring for a business. It means to achieve distinction, you don't have to change everything and become completely different from all your competition. Instead, distinction comes when you create small, solid points that are different and important from the customer's perspective. When customers are faced with so many bland choices, anything that is different is refreshing and therefore superior. Thus, to attain distinction, you don't have to be better in every dimension imaginable. Rather there are four basic points which actually create the foundation on which distinction can be built: "Through my research and experience, I've discovered that there are Four Cornerstones of Distinction. Every company and every person must draw upon these qualities to develop differentiation and uniqueness in the marketplace. These cornerstones will, at first, appear to be elementary. However, the more you study them - and what it requires to be successful at each - the more you will realize how spectacularly challenging it is to execute them." - Scott McKain