25 May Differentiating Yourself
There will always be companies professing to offer competitive products or services that are “just as good” as yours. You know they’re not, but can your prospective customers tell the difference between you and your competition? Maybe they’re cheaper or have better looking product images, but yours is the solution they should choose. Can you make that distinction to win the project outright?
Give your device something to shout about
For many products, design is something of an afterthought. Engineer a device with high-tech specs, give it a shell and send it on its way. But, if you’re selling a product and the best features are under the hood, perhaps there are ways for you to highlight those features another way. Even if you’re selling a high-quality oscilloscope destined for the lab, you could still use high-quality knobs and add color to the housing to make yours stand out among the gray rectangles in the catalog.
Improve the user interface
A device with a complicated or convoluted user interface can harm a product as much as inferior performance specs. Although it never gets enough press in the advertising, don’t overlook the importance of an easy to use interface and user-friendly prompts. Aim to create a device that doesn’t even need a user manual. Many people won’t look at one until they get stuck anyway, so to prevent them from doing something inadvertently, it’s probably best to anticipate their impatience.
Zig when they zag
If your competitors are all focused on achieving the fastest sample time or the highest diagnostic accuracy, perhaps they’re leaving an undiscovered market in their wake. Can you reach a set of previously ignored customers that are looking for a solution that doesn’t need to be the fastest or the most accurate, but it does need to be cheap and easy to use by an untrained assistant?
If you’re the market leader, and your competitors are at your heels, there are worse problems to have (you could have no market at all…). But, differentiating yourself from the “me, too” competition is a tough job. It’s always easier to copy than to innovate, but you don’t want to wait for them to fly past you just to make your job easier, do you?
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