Building A Thriving Business (What's at the VERY CORE) Pt 8

We all know in every industry, the players are pretty much doing the same things, with the competitive advantage at a variance of roughly 20% - some are slightly doing better or worse. This is what has been termed the red ocean of competition, where there is no distinct differentiation - check out blue ocean strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. Any business in that sphere can't thrive, because everyone is looking at edging out the competition; their strategic mind has been switched to survival mode. It takes a business leader who is hungry for growth, to stop the vicious cycle, and look to differentiate, and enjoy a low costing structure.

How To Differentiate Your Offering

One way is to start by looking at the pain points in your industry; what puts customers off, what intimidates, what frustrates, what makes them not trust, what makes them confused, what makes them fearful. This will enable you to get new customers or create an entirely new area of competition within your industry. With a social media presence we can communicate with potential customers to search for responses to these questions, which is an inexpensive approach to having focus groups, trade shows, printing questionnaires in magazines or even going out in person to find them, as 90% of the world is now online. The goal at the end of the market research is to look for competing factors in your industry to eliminate and reduce, and offerings/services to raise and create. You want to be creating a benefit for the new customers to enjoy, and reducing or eliminating the barrier of entry.

Are You Creating Value?

In differentiating, you have to ensure that you are creating real value for the customers, more than anyone else in the industry, at a strategic price point, while ensuring that the change is sustainable and profitable in the long run. Companies with sales teams will have to convince their employees that the new change can be adopted.

Don't Forget To Optimise

Like anything analytical, its implementation has to be tested with different options in the market place, with the options yielding the most return adopted to enable you have multiple streams of business.

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