In a world of similar products, how do you stand out?
Swimming lessons in red oceans
Last week I attended a conference in London. As I was walking between the different companies’ booths I could not help but notice they were all using the same buzz words, very similar design, repeating colours and even the fonts were identical. It made me wonder about our obsession with blue oceans and what could be the differentiation factor when building a product in a what turns to be a red ocean?
First I should admit that I don’t believe in searching blue oceans as a strategy any more than I believe that I would become rich by filling out lottery tickets. I believe in hard work, in understanding user needs and in building solutions to these needs. I assume that if there really is a need and a business case out there, there should be more than one company trying to address it. So I actually think that having competitors and an active ecosystem of players in your market is a good sign. It also means that we would need to work harder to stand out, but that should not discourage us in our quest.
How do we differentiate ourselves in a world of similar products?
In order to answer that we need to really know our users and what they need. There were search engines before Google, it was not an empty space that Larry and Sergey entered, they addressed the problem differently, making search results more relevant to the searcher by introducing PageRank. Facebook was not the first social network, amazon not the first e-commerce site, iPhone not the first smartphone. They all had competition early on, but their product offering was somehow better than their competitors.
So I guess the question really is, how do we do it better? In order to answer that we should go back to what “better” means for our users. Better could mean quicker (a better internet connection for example), more variety (Netflix movie offering), cheaper (price of ride-sharing services vs traditional taxi companies) or something entirely different.
While looking for the unique value proposition, we should examine the complete experience of the user and this includes what happens to our users beyond our product. Zappos for example “deliver wow through service”. While their design is sleek and easy to use, the selection is good and varied, you can probably find similar services out there with a similar website experience. In a world of so many e-commerce sites, Zappos chose to delight their customers by providing them with the best service they could possibly dream of (even helping them order a pizza if this is what they crave for). Their unique value proposition is not limited to their beautifully designed screens, it expands to addressing the full experience of their users.
When encountering similar products to our own we should not fear, it is actually a good sign that other companies chose to invest time and effort into this line of business, meaning there are others who thought there is potential in this line of business. We should strive to work harder to define our value proposition and this could reside in the complete experience that happens before or after your users actually “uses” your product. The experience includes a much wider area of use beyond your beautiful design and wonderful UX. Do not despair when facing competitors, find a way to do it even better.
