Making your customers right
Matt Heinz
Bashing your competitors is easy. It’s also a very slippery slope.
Leveraging a competitor’s position to accentuate your strengths is smarter. It allows you to acknowledge that you’re not the only player in the field, but that you offer a superior product or service.
Seth does a nice job with competitive positioning in his recent riff on Verizon’s iPhone positioning strategy this week.
Rather than bash the new competitor, demonstrate your relative strengths in the marketplace. Let your current customers know that they’ve made the right choice with you, and help prospective customers understand your comparative strengths.
Seth also rightly points out the enormous opportunity the iPhone has created for cell phone marketers everywhere. Yes, the iPhone is exciting, but it’s also already introducing new challenges, problems and pain points (such as battery life, complexity and durability) that other manufacturers and service providers can build on in their own marketing – without even mentioning their new convergent competitor.
