Standing Out in the Crowd

Standing Out in the Crowd
ID-ONE's News-Letter
November 2009



Standing Out: Product Positioning



There are lots of ways to position an existing product to compete in today’s market. You can even create the perception of differentiation, with product positioning.




1. Capture the customer’s imagination.
If your product is virtually identical to other products in the market, try looking at it from a different perspective. Find a new attribute that can get customers excited and focus your positioning around it.

2. Reinvent the “customer experience.” Shake up the competitive landscape by rethinking the customer experience in new terms. Customers’ preferences change over time and as market conditions fluctuate. Take advantage of this.

3. Only target up, not down the totem pole. If you are not first in the market, publicly and to customers, always position your product relative to the market leader. It elevates your product in terms of customer perception. That said, train your sales force (and other internal groups) on features - benefits versus all competitors.

4. Infrastructure (or ecosystem) as a competitive barrier. This is an important and often ignored aspect of product planning and positioning. Many products and services, especially in technology, require related companies and industries to support them in some way. If you get enough support for your product, it can be an extraordinarily effective competitive barrier that you can use in positioning.

5. Market share gains are expensive. There’s simply no way around this. Market share comes at a heavy cost. Your product planning and positioning must reflect that or your P&L will suffer and you’ll end up back at the drawing board. The cost is a function of how entrenched the leaders are and the perceived “switching cost” for customers.
Adapted from Destroy the Competition With Positioning Strategy By Steve Tobak at BNET.com

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What is Good Design?

1. It does something useful
Especially if it does something that hasn’t been done before.



2. Fulfilling its function efficiently
Even better in a way that is entertaining, fun.



3. Features and function are important, but so are looks
There’s nothing wrong with eye candy, but people’s view of what looks good is always changing and sometimes even conflicting. Now the definition of beautiful is often multifaceted, challenging or thought provoking.



4. Innovation appeals.
Is new better than old? It appears that new will always be seductive.



5. User interface.
Is it easy to operate? Being able to easily figure out how it works shapes the experience.



6. Environmentally Conscious
Good design must be ethically, socially and environmentally responsible. Sometimes this trumps aesthetically pleasing design.

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In "Good design" these qualities and characteristics that represent and deliver "goodness" would be obvious, consistent and established. The more often designers work this way, the more confidence people will have in the things they design improving honest and useful communications between designer and end user.

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The Information Age

We have come to believe that all we need do is to collect more and more information, and the way forward will be clear. There are times when information alone does create value. More often, it is the thinking applied to the information that creates value.



Research shows that people who go to the cinema are between 15 and 25 years of age. So the studios make films to fit the tastes of this age bracket. Suddenly a different movie appears: My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It tops the box office in the US. Why? Because there is a huge audience outside the 15-25 group who do not go to the movies because none of the films interest them.



This is but one example of how information without thinking can be highly dangerous. Yet we persist in putting all our effort into information gathering and virtually no effort into thinking. Thinking is no substitute for information. Only rarely is information a substitute for thinking. The purpose of design is to take all the information and factors and then design value. Value needs to be designed, unless you just want to copy someone else's design.
from Design and judgment: Why we need to change our emphasis from judgment to design By Edward de Bono

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Good design is about creating perceived value!

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No More Black Boxes!



No, we’re not talking about airplanes!



Wayne Brush, one of the principals here at ID-ONE, once worked at a company that makes testing devices.** He often relates the story of a time when the marketing department took their product to a trade show. Their product was superior in almost every way, save one. While their product worked better and had more features than any of the others in the market place, it didn’t sell well. The reason? It was a black box. The majority of the products at the show, in the professional opinion of the marketing guys, “looked cool.”



I wish I could say that the company got smart and invested in some product design, but they didn’t.



**If you’re reading this newsletter (you know who you are!) - it’s not too late! Heck, we’ll even offer you a discount.




Entrepreneur’s Corner

Myth: I looked everywhere and didn’t see anything like it, so it must not already exist.



Smart patent holders have developed as broad a patent as possible to prevent others from creating a product that is similar to theirs and possibly stealing the market. These variations may never be developed and made into a product, but are nonetheless valid. It is necessary to do a thorough patent search to be assured the product does not already exist. These time-consuming patent searches can be done through a patent attorney (expensive!), a product development firm (less expensive), or the entrepreneur can do the search themselves through somewhere like Google Patents..

Tip: When searching somewhere like Google Patents, be sure to avoid using search terms that describe your concept too specifically. You might be surprised at how well this information is tracked and your IP (intellectual property) could be stolen before you even get a chance to develop it.





ID-ONE's November Wink at Product Development




Snuggie –In late 2008 and early 2009 the "Snuggie" brand of sleeved blankets became a pop culture phenomenon, sometimes described humorously as a "cult". The phenomenon resulted in sales of the Snuggie and its rivals that far exceeded their distributors' expectations: more than 4 million Snuggies and 1 million Slankets as of February, 2009. The phenomenon has even inspired similarly-marketed knock-off products.