Five Ways to Rise Above the Market Noise

Read the ad copy of providers like Dell, Gateway, HP or Sony and it sounds like it all came from the same template. After all, these providers are creating products to the same specifications. It's the plight of firms that compete in mature, commoditized markets where standards rule.

The IT services industry has become plagued with commoditization as well. Packed with competitors, the ads of IT service provides imitate each others messaging, mostly about "harnessing the value of technology to achieve business advantage."

Read ads from Accenture, Deloitte, IBM Global Services, even sharp up-and-comers like Cognizant. It's "cut and paste" advertising.

In an attempt to get above the noise, Bearing Point made it all about business performance. Its message remained unique for about five minutes.

How do you stay out of the noise and build unique qualities into your messaging? It's challenging, but not impossible.

1.  Sell Shoes to the Shoemaker
Cathline Marshall heads Studio K&M. Her strategy is to sell creative services to creative people. Her positioning statement immediately got my attention. What creative services firms sell to competitors?

It's a twist on the shoemaker's children syndrome (that the shoemaker's kids aren't wearing good shoes).

My closet organizer for example, admits that when it comes to her own personal life: she's disorganized.

The examples go on and on (interior designers rarely get around to designing their own interiors).

We all have a hard time delivering our own expertise to ourselves. Hence, Studio K&M has found a niche that is absent of the usual noise. I have yet to hear this positioning statement from a designer. Are Studio K&M's services unique? Not really. Is her market choice? Definitely.

While Studio K&M sells to other designers, it doesn't stop there. Musicians, actors, and entertainers all with creative talents - are part of K&M's target market.  Her competitors are likely internal design shops (which are likely untrained to sell against her) or creative types that just never get around to using their own talents to promote themselves.

2.  Partner With Unlikely Bedfellows 
BMW has partnered with Equinox (an upscale health club and spa) in some new promotionals.

Both are in completely different markets, yet sell to the same demographic.

BMW ties their automotive performance to athletic performance and offers special deals to Equinox members.

Not a bad pairing of a common message and a common market from unlikely bedfellows.

3.  Borrow (or Steal) Ideas From Non-Competitors
B2B marketers often get their best ideas from consumer companies. When Lee Iacocca brought Chrysler back from the dead, he borrowed ideas from the food industry, drawing on the marketing practices of Wesson Oil. 

When I was with Cambridge Technology Partners, we borrowed concepts from entertainment. We conducted "theater workshops" or scenarios customized to a client's real life situation. These mini plays, complete with actors, a script and a director, illustrated the drama of how bad business processes make life a living hell for everyday employees and their customers.

Naturally, the mini drama ended with our systems marching them out of hell to a nirvana of productivity. Executive decision-makers ate it up and our close ratio skyrocketed.

If you're an IT services firm, why not borrow practices from consumer banking? Think about an ad campaign all about the tranquility associated with achieving financial goals and financial freedom. Or look at ads outside your industry (pick up Cosmo) and steal some ideas from Neutrogena. Sound wacky? Sure. But you'll likely surprise yourself. Don't be afraid to brainstorm. They're just ideas. 

4.  Package Your Offerings
Services are often hard to buy because they are too open-ended.

If you hate the question "How much do you charge?" your clients hate your "It depends" answer even more. 

Think about offering a fixed price starter service package where one size fits all. Come up with crystal-clear deliverables, a schedule, a price tag and terms. Once you've delivered your starter service, you can migrate to custom pricing. And once your client is already in bed with you, your "It depends" response won't be quite as annoying to them.

When prospects ask how they get started with you, your quick, confident response with a competitive price tag will have them pulling our their pens to sign. Your competitors are usually terrible at bounding their price. If you can tackle this successfully, you'll rise above the noise.

5.  Sell With Statistics
Find a good number you can hang your hat on. SAP's research found their their users are 32 percent more profitable than companies that don't use their solutions. Studies are based on SAP shops from publicly held companies with easily accessible financial performance data.

One of my former colleagues, Gordon Brooks, used to combine this technique with what he called "pain in the ass marketing." (Gordon isn't shy).

His favorite question to clients was "which application in your portfolio is the biggest pain in the ass?" 

He would then offer to take it off the customer's hands right into his outsourcing firm. Another important part of his tactic: the higher the pain, the higher the price.

What's the biggest pain about cell phones, other than the people that use them?

According to research: incomplete calls.  Hence, clever CMO Mark Lefar of Cingular hired an independent research company (Telephia of San Francisco) to validate that Cingular has the fewest dropped calls of any wireless carrier. It fits in perfectly with his "more bars in more places."

Maybe Marc should do joint PR events with the city's hottest lounges, like Spice Market, or other hip watering holes in New York's meat packing district. Hey Marc, just a thought.

So, if you're in a mature market that has reached commodity status:

Focus NOT on the attributes and features of your offering, but on the things that surround it. Most of the time, nobody's looking at the periphery.

Granted, sometimes building unique qualities into your ad copy, as we've seen in this exercise, introduces market positioning issues, but it's worth the pain of discovery.