You've founded a company and have begun developing your product. So how do you start attracting people's attention? It's all about finding your niche, explains marketing expert Al Ries. Along with Jack Trout, Ries was credited with coining the marketing term "positioning". This is the idea that a brand can succeed by emphasising the features that make it different from its closest competitors. WIRED asked Ries for his best advice for making a product stand out from the crowd.
Try targeting a smaller, defined user base at first. Take the social networks Friendster, MySpace and Facebook. Although Facebook was founded after its competitors, Ries says it had the better strategy: "Instead of aiming to become a brand like the other two, Facebook was initially conceived as a product for Harvard students. Then it moved on to the Ivy League." Only after winning over that student cohort did it become available to everyone.
"Who will believe a new product developed by an unknown entrepreneur is better than, say, a global brand created by a world-famous company? Virtually no one," Ries says. Rather than make value judgments, focus on objective differences. The main reason Monster rose to become the second-most popular energy drink in the US, he says, is because its can was bigger than that of market leader Red Bull.
Adding new features to an existing product is an ineffectual way to catch people's eye. "A better direction is to start by subtracting something," Reis says. "BlackBerry dominated the mobile market with its physical keyboard. Apple started its iPhone design process by eliminating the keyboard." We know how that story ended.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
