How To Change Your Competitive Advantage Into The Most Effective Weapon.
If you can’t tell your story, making it relevant to a buyer, you lose.
You probably know your competitive advantage. Good start. Successfully translate your advantage into how it solves a buyer’s problem, you win. Struggle to sell your solution, you fail. Reject this reality and you reserve your place in anonymity.
Yes, you need to understand and hone your advantage, it’s the foundation upon which you build customer relationships. But it’s only half of your narrative. The other half is broadcasting that advantage in ways that slide your key into your client’s problem lock.
Your unique advantage is not being around since 1946 or being open from 8-5. It’s how you change lives. How you install smiles.
Company A might say, our toasters have a 500 gigaforce toast cooker that only consumes a nanowatt of power. Want to sell that? Nobody’s buying. What a toast eater wants is perfectly done toast in 10 seconds. If you can do that, both you and your customer get what you want. A bank deposit and a smile, respectively.
Sadly, most companies are selling their Megaforce power and other irrelevant statistics. That’s the easy way. They look at the product, evaluate its features, build a production story, stir, and present.
Thinking is much harder. Understanding human behaviors, contemplating myriad potential product interactions, and creating compelling actions are mind-bending mountains few aspire to scale.
But we know those brands that put in the effort. We happily trade dollars for the ownership experience.
Remember Quibi? Me neither. Their pitch decks must have been awesome. Investor checkbooks opened wide. Over $1.75B, that’s right billion, was invested in the video streaming upstart. Never gaining traction, Quibi launched in April 2020 and folded 6 months later.
On its April 6 launch day, TechCrunch reported 300,000 Quibi downloads, hitting #3 in the App Store. A week later, Quibi announced 1.7M downloads had been reached, claiming the #11 spot on Google’s Play Store.
A month later, Quibi fell outside the top 50 downloaded apps. Sensor Tower reported Quibi slid to 125th. It was like standing at the midpoint in a bobsled race where the racer just zips by on the way to the bottom.
By June, Quibi executives were taking pay cuts. Expecting to acquire 7.4M active users, Quibi never reached 50% of its projections. Attempting to salvage a horrific start, multiple pricing tiers, expanding into mainstream media, and ad-supported versions were introduced. All failed.
On October 22, just 6 months after its launch, Quibi announced it would cease operations on December 1.
Their business model was built on delivering unique videos on mobile devices. They spent over $1B creating original content, 8500 short-form episodes across 175 shows. Produced in mobile’s unique screen aspect ratios, Quibi shows were delivered in 10 episode series, with each “quick bite” episode lasting 10 minutes. In case you wondered about Quibi's bizarre name, the company’s moniker evolved from a shortened version of “quick bite”.
Quibi executives believed people wanted to pay for their mainstream content on their phones. Sounds reasonable. In reality they didn’t, at least not from Quibi. YouTube, TikTok, and other free providers killed Quibi. Quibi died at the hands of competitors who weren’t in the fight.
So obsessed with drinking their own Kool-Aid, any compelling message about why to subscribe was kept locked in the closet. Assuming a thirsty market and speeding right into content production, Quibi didn’t differentiate their product successfully. Consumers sidestepped Quibi’s paid entertainment venue, seeing widely available free content as sufficiently satisfying. A major miscalculation by Quibi’s management.
I’ll bet you have identified your competitive advantage, like most intelligent leaders. It’s a solid start, but it’s not enough. To measure your effectiveness ask yourself:
Is our reason for being serving us or our customers?
Can our customers easily define why we exist?
Does our solutions set offer a competitive value?
Candid contemplations of these questions will reveal your level of leverage in the market. The right answers, as viewed by customers, move you closer to being the best choice.