“Being different is to be not the sameâ€, wrote a well-known marketing consultant. It is also the most important marketing decision that any software development firm will have to make in order to survive and prosper in the overcrowded and thin Mac OS X marketplace.
Before we discuss what it means to be different, we need to understand the problem at hand. A quick catalog browsing of any Mac software retailer will leave you with a huge product choice. In some categories, the choice can be overwhelming. In other words, the user needs to choose one and she or he is good to go. It’s a en environment where there only can be one winner. As a software user yourself, you know that as long as you’re satisfied with one product you will stick to it.
A quick visit to my favorite online store, Amazon.com, will illustrate my point. In the Business & Office section of the Mac software store, any presentation software shopper will be faced with 62 products to choose from. Only one presentation software will be purchased. No rocket science needed to safely guess that the winner was the one who stood out in the shopper’s mind. How? By being different.
Being different is how you survive in the Mac OS X marketplace where there’s only room for one in the user’s computer. Consequently, this means making sales or products gathering digital dust (I’ve always wanted to use this expression).
Being different means positioning your software in a way that the prospect will choose you over others. This is why, it’s the most important part of your business strategy. In business books, differentiation is commonly referred to as the USP short for Unique Selling Proposition a concept pioneered by Rosser Reeves in his first book, The Reality of Advertising published in 1961.
Crafting a USP is no easy task I tell you. It may require that you have to invent something new and hope that the buying public will embrace it. It may mean making daring competitive moves against established software by competitors.
Being different does not mean coming up with a complex supernatural product that will erase your prospective users’ problems in a flash. Sometimes, the difference can be in making a product simpler.
If you happen to market yet another software that comes across as yet another software by any of your competitors, you’re in real trouble. You need, no, have to be different to survive not only in software development but also in life.
In the future posts, we’ll look at specific software firms and what difference makes them so successful. In the meantime, what are you doing to be different?
