Differentiation: a key marketing strategy
Seth Godin posted an article on really bad branding a couple of days ago, pointing out some company names that don’t differentiate companies very well:
Jewelry Central is a really bad brand name. So are Party Land, Computer World, Modem Village, House of Socks and Toupee Town.
It’s a bad brand name because Central or Land or World are meaningless. They add absolutely no value to your story, they mean nothing and they are interchangeable.
Why is differentiation such a key marketing strategy?
It’s simple - you only truly succeed as a brand, and as a business, by being top-of-mind in your targeted clients’ minds. And you can only be top-of-mind in your clients’ minds by having a clear, identifiable, distinguishable identity … ideally an unique identity with a story.
The name is a piece of it - an important piece. The image is an important piece. The story is an important piece. The products you choose to create and market are important pieces. The successes you build are important pieces. The customers that you enable are important pieces.
Put them all together, you’ve got a brand.
But if it’s not differentiated … if a client can’t distinguish your name, image, story, products, and successes from competitors … all of it is meaningless.
Because that client will open up the yellow pages (in other words, Google), search, find you and your competitor, and go eeny meany miny mo. Which means that all your hard work and all your investments in marketing mean nothing. Differentiation, which needs to start before your marketing, and even before your product development, is an effort to ensure this doesn’t happen.
This is all obvious. So why are so many companies not differentiated?
Here’s why: differentiation requires discrimination. If you want to be differentiated, you must say no. There must be certain products you won’t build. Certain markets you won’t pursue. Certain clients you don’t want. These are all clear and undeniable corollaries of choosing certain products that you will invest in, certain markets that you will pursue, and certain clients that you definitely do want.
However, many companies can’t say no.
They fail to see that in saying no, they gain increased capability to say a very focused, powerful yes.
Quote of the day
I’m currently reading Chris Hunter’s Eight Lives Down, an autobiography of his time in Iraq with the British army as an explosives technician, defusing bombs and IEDs.
He starts off every chapter with a quote, and I really appreciated this one:
We tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress, while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.
- Gaius Petronius (AD 66)
Having gone through my fair share of re-orgs in the past decade, that 2000-year old quote rings very true.
Everyone, everywhere, wants to go offline
Just saw this article on Webware about Prism, which is technology for extending applications beyond the browser. Yes, there are times when the cloud is just not available.
Very, very cool.
We already have Google Gears, of course, and Adobe AIR (on which some amazing apps are being built), and Microsoft’s Silverlight. And I’m sure there’s many I haven’t heard of yet …
The question is: are all of these frameworks for seamless online/offline development going to survive, or will one or two take the lion’s share of the market?
Whatever happens, these are good times to be a web developer, as with a little effort you’re now able to make your application run close to desktop-quality, even when there’s no internet connection.
3 wonderful little words: I don’t know
Some 3-word phrases are very hard to say. And I’m not talking about the agonizing decision about when to tell your boyfriend or girlfriend that it’s more than just a “like” situation.
“I don’t know” seem to be the hardest three words to say, as VC Josh Kopelman makes clear:
Why do people feel pressure to have an answer for every answer?
I don’t know …
The fact is, many insecure people are unwilling or unable to reveal ignorance. It takes a certain degree of self-assurance or confidence to be able to freely admit that you don’t know something. I think most of us have been in contact - perhaps very close contact - with men of a certain generation that could never say they were wrong, or never admit error, or ask for directions. I think this is a related issue.
The funny thing is that today, todays’ criteria for what makes someone smart is not so much what they can store in their brain, but what they can quickly find, integrate, and utilize. 21st century skills are much more about information access than information recall.
The fact is that with the world’s store of data increasingly ever more and more rapidly, you and I simply don’t have headspace for the vast majority of information that is being created. What’s more, we don’t want to have headspace for it. All we want to know is that the information is out there, somewhere, accessible if and when we need it.
Searching beats storing.
So there’s no point in not being honest enough to admit there’s things you don’t know. That’s not a negative. The negative is a false belief in your own limited knowledge. The negative is also a lack of ability (or inclination) to search out and use new information as it become relevant to the kinds of things you’re doing today and tomorrow.
Today, the smart person says “I don’t know. But I can learn!”
4 straight losses for the Vancouver Canucks
It’s Friday night and I’m surfing around while listening to the Canucks-Wild game on the Team 1040. The Canucks are just about to lose their fourth in a row and doubt is growing in Vancouver that they’ll make the playoffs.
I have to say it’s very, very unrewarding to be a Vancouver fan - it’s almost enough to put someone off of hockey.
The problems?
- Can’t score
- Can’t keep the puck out of their own net
- Not tough enough
- Not big enough
- Not enough heart
It has not been pretty lately.
. . .
. . .
BTW, I’ve joined a 3-on -3 league at the Abbotsford Training Rink, a half-size rink. I haven’t had this much fun playing hockey for years … it’s all offence, offence, offence.
Chocolate bunny
Aidan recently entered a coloring contest at a local store.
The prize was a 5 kilogram chocolate Easter bunny, and Aidan was 100% sure he was going to win.
Sure enough, on Friday last week we got a call from the store. Aidan, Ethan, and I went down and picked up the bunny, which is bigger than Aidan.
As soon as I saw it, I was thinking … hmm … probably from China, the chocolate probably tastes like wax. Actually, it was made in Montreal, and the chocolate - while not exactly gourmet - is not bad at all.
Good thing it’s hollow, but I still have no clue how we’re going to eat it all!
Here’s a shot of him actually inside the box …
Now the question is: what on earth are we going to do with 5 kilograms of milk chocolate?
Anybody want some chocolate, cheap?
Sharon Faber @ ASCD
I recently attended Sharon Faber’s (who has various sites) session at ASCD.
Wow, she is an energetic and passionate woman - and she’s primarily passionate about kids learning how to read. I could not have enjoyed her session more. Here are some key take-aways, in no particular order …
- Most people are unconsciously competent, but they need to be consciously competent. (Of course, we don’t want to be unconsciously incompetent!)
- Four key things in education:
Meta-cognition, differentiation (DI), professional learning communities, and scaffolding. - Differentiation in kids: if you let the kids sit where they want at the beginning of the school year, they’ll show you how well they’ll do. First row: keeners; middle section: middle achievers, underachievers; back row: at risk kids.
- “When the horse dies, get off!!!”
- Two critical things when introducing new units:
Vocabulary and prior knowledge. Use introduction guides! - All kids love to argue - get them to argue about content by creating introduction guides with controversial statements, some of which are true and some of which are not.
- For group work, put kids in pairs, not triads. Everyone will have to pull their own weight.
- Education standards say WHAT, not HOW.
- Kids live in the NOW.
- We learn in odd numbers, not even.
- Cross-curricular skills are important (e.g. inference: in English, prediction; in Math, estimation; in Science, hypothesis)
- K-3 is learning to read; 4-12 is reading to learn.
- The 5 elements of reading:
Phonemic awareness, phonics, comprehension, vocabulary, fluency - Vocabulary is different in different circumstances … the size goes down through listening, reading, speaking, and writing
- Help kids develop fluency by reading aloud from the textbook for 5 minutes each day.
It really wasn’t as disjointed as this laundry list of things … but it was a rapid-fire session. These are just the things that stood out for me, and I wanted to record.
Chris Colwell: Superintendent Volusia County @ ASCD
Chris Colwell is a deputy superintendent at Volusia County schools in Florida, which includes the Daytona beach area. He’s also a soft-spoken hero in the struggle to make American education relevant, rigorous, and effective. I recently attended his session at ASCD in New Orleans.
Some of the key take-aways from his talk:
- Struggling kids? “Acceleration is the best form of remediation.”
- “Forget about assessments and high stakes tests. Teach to the standards.”
- District leadership needs to be clear, consistent, have high expectations, be ruthlessly prioritized, and provide support, support, support.
Volusia County has created a very deliberate approach to instructional design. They begin with the education standards - the state standards. Then they’ve designed the assessment that would measure performance on those standards. Then, and only then, do they create the lessons that would teach what students need to know in order to perform well on the assessments. They find that this saves a ton of instructional time, because teachers tend to teach their favorite topics, which may or may not correspond with standards and what kids actually need to know. They focus on the critical, not the peripheral. The College Board has helped them create this curriculum.
Volusia also uses a lot of formative assessment - checking during learning that kids are learning what they’re supposed to be learning. This prepares students well for the summative assessment … which often comes in the form of standardized high-stakes tests.
They pay for all kids in grades 8-10 to take the PSAT, they have vastly increased participation in AP (advanced placement) courses, and they are big believers in AVID.
All in all, very impressive!
Alma Powell @ ASCD
A week ago or so I had the privilege of hearing Alama Powell speak at the ASCD conference in New Orleans.
She leads the America’s Promise Alliance, which is built on the research-supported premise that 5 things in kids lives make the difference between successful transition to adulthood, and various forms of failure. Those 5 things are:
- Caring adults
- Safe places
- A healthy start
- Effective education
- Opportunities to help others
She listed some startling statistics:
- there are 7000 kids dropping out of school each day in the US
- there are 9 million kids without health insurance
- kids who lack 3 of the 5 promises have twice the poverty rate and 8 times the incarceration rate versus kids who have all 5
She was a great speaker, and is a passionate woman - it was very enjoyable to hear her. She also happens to be the wife of Colin Powell
In the dude-change-the-name category
I was assiduously building my network on LinkedIn today when I noticed the “new people from Premier” (my current company). Knowing that the “new people” are almost never from the Premier that I’m from, I obediently checked, only to find these people …
They include an unfortunate individual in the position of interim manager named Dick Slob.
I submit that he should run, not walk, to the nearest hall of officialdom where name-changing occurs. His first name is an epithet; his last a slur.
You can’t make stuff like this up - it’s just too good. Were his parents Serbs named Slobodan? Did they want to disavow connections with the infamous Milosevic? Did they think it was just easier to spell?
Guaranteed: he changes the name, the interim comes off his title.
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Sparkplug 9 is John Koetsier's blog on life, the universe, and everything,
but mostly the stuff you see big in the tags to the left.
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