Story 8

How We’re Different from Our Competitors

A Marketing Story

As any first-year MBA student can attest, marketing is largely about differentiation. It communicates how your product or service is different from your many competitors. And that’s important because, as I learned from interviewing procurement managers at dozens of companies, competitors in many industries are so similar that it’s difficult for even professional buyers to tell them apart .

Marketers use a number of approaches to accomplish that differentiation, from a straightforward list of the distinguishing features and benefits, to branding, customer segmentation, stratified pricing, and many others.

But as a leader, whether you’re talking to a prospective customer, the investment community, or just helping the people in your department appreciate why your company’s product is better than the competition, your best tool is a story.

For example, Sharad Madison is the CEO of the commercial cleaning company United Building Maintenance. When Sharad is trying to explain how his company is different from his many competitors, he often tells the following story about what he does when he acquires a new client :

When we take over a new contract, we typically have a thirty-day transition period. We take that time to go into the new building in the middle of the night to see how they’re cleaning it, to find out if they’re properly trained and have the right tools.

For example, we recently took over the contract for the Verizon building in New Jersey. That’s a 1.7-million-square-foot property across several buildings. So, we went in and found a guy vacuuming the carpet. It turns out, he was using the same kind of residential-quality vacuum cleaner you probably use at home. Now, those hallways are twelve feet wide and over half a mile long. Can you imagine trying to clean the whole property with the same machine you use at home? It could take a week, and it still wouldn’t be very clean. Plus, that vacuum will have to be replaced every few months.

We ordered him a triple-wide, industrial-strength vacuum that’ll do the job in less than half the time and last forever .

Then we went to another floor and found someone shampooing those same carpets with a regular walk-behind shampooer. Again, that could take all night just to shampoo that one floor. We put him in a high-speed riding shampooer that could do the job in a fraction of the time with much better results. Plus, it gets the guy off his feet. It’s safer for him and means fewer workman’s comp issues for me and the client.

Then we got to the offices and started looking at the top of the file cabinets. You could see half-moons swiped out on top of them. I know exactly why that happens. Those cabinets were five and a half feet tall and several of the people cleaning them were shorter than that. So, it’s not that they’re lazy. They just couldn’t reach high enough to clean all the way to the back.

We showed them what that looks like to the client and explained that the half-moon is actually worse than not cleaning it at all, since it’s the contrast that makes it look dirty. And then we gave them all plastic extension wands so they could reach all the way to the back.

Now, compare that story to how Sharad might explain his points of differentiation if he was using the more typical “features and benefits” type of marketing language. It would sound something like this: “What makes us different is that we equip our cleaners with triple-wide, industrial-strength vacuum cleaners, high-speed riding shampooers, and extension wands for dusting.”

And that’s true. Those are the facts. But the story is far more compelling because, with the story, listeners can see in their minds’ eyes all of those pieces of equipment in use. They can see the guy going from the cheap vacuum cleaner to the triple-wide one. They can picture the guy riding around on the shampooer like the Zamboni driver on an ice-skating rink. And they can see very clearly someone easily cleaning all the way to the back of a tall, dusty cabinet with a plastic extension wand.

Plus, the story makes it obvious that Sharad and his management team care enough to get up in the middle of the night to go walk those floors and see how to make improvements. Just mentioning that you check up on things on-site isn’t nearly as convincing as a story that proves you did .

Tips to help you craft your own marketing story

Ask the following questions. You might need to get input from the sales, marketing, or market research departments to find good answers.

Think of a time that you (or someone else) used one of your competitor’s products or services and had a bad experience. What was that experience like, and how does it differ from an experience with your product?

Think of some of the most positive customer-success stories at your company. What was so fabulous about them that isn’t likely to happen with competing products?

My favorite: Talk to some of your customers who used to use your competitors’ products but have switched to yours. What about their experience made them switch? And what has been their experience now with your product?

Choose one of those experiences and craft a story around it that illustrates the difference between your product or service and your competitor’s. It could simply be two stories told one after the other: a bad customer experience with your competitor’s product, and a good customer experience with your product.