User>Driven

Last week I was visiting with a customer, an online seller of branded sports apparel. Someone in the meeting noted that when speaking of the competition she completely ignored other brands, focusing on the other channels selling her product.

We asked why and and she said "The gap between [her brand] and its potential is far greater than the gap between [her brand] and it's competitors." I thought that so well encapsulated my feelings about dealing with the competition that I would share it here.

Competitive analysis is a standard product management task and necessary sometimes. Sales people and prospects ask for feature comparisons. And when your product is closely comparable to another or when you are the discount brand, checklists can be useful for positioning. In my experience, though, much greater market success comes form staking out your own territory.

Think about it this way: would you rather have a conversation with a prospect about whether your feature list is longer than the competition's or about the benefits the prospect will derive from your product? Which of those conversations would allow you to charge more? If you're concentrating on market needs rather than competitive checklists, you have a chance at that second, more profitable conversation.

Similarly, would you rather spend your development efforts on duplicating the competition's every feature so you can say "yes" when asked if you have it, or would you rather concentrate on building the features that will solve your customers' problems? I'd much rather be thought of as great than as just better than someone else.

Building value that responds to market need puts you in partnership with your customers. They come to you to solve their problems. Getting into a checklist war with your competitors just invites your customer to look at you and the competition in the same way - to hold you both arm's length.

So don't be better than the competition. Be great.

Well, I went and did it. I created a User-Driven T-shirt at Zazzle, one of a number of design-your-own-clothing sites. I designed a simple brown T with yellow lettering to match the color scheme of the site, ordered one for myself, and then offered the shirts up for sale on Zazzle. Anyone can order one and I will make a small royalty on it (10% of what you pay).

I haven't held the actual product in in my hands yet to tell you whether the yellow and brown look good together, but you can customize the color, style, size, etc on zazzle to your liking. You can even order a hoodie, henley or polo. Just be sure to change the text color to something darker if you choose a light-colored background.

I created a hoodie with the word "vintage" on it as well (in good old courier) in honor of how ancient I have become. Nothing fancy but it has a simplicity to it that appeals to me. Check that item out as well at the gallery of the merchandise I've created. I've added a link to the gallery on the right after the "about" paragraph.

Zazzle has a flash widget that shows the products in your gallery in rotation. I tried to put it up here but it's too wide and doesn't take kindly to being squashed or cropped. 

Web 2.0 sometimes refers to the cool interactive Ajax features you see on sites that allow you to send and receive information without reloading the page. These tools allow webpages to act more like desktop software in their richness, responsiveness and usability. For an example, check out what happens when you click on one of the small shirt images on the right side of this page from Abercrombie & Fitch's website.

Of more interest to me is the other definition of web 2.0 which gets at the exchange of social information enabled by the web. I'm not so much interested in Facebook or MySpace or other purely social sites (though I do use LinkedIn extensively). What interests me is how the web can enable feedback to companies about their products and services so companies can reap the benefits of becoming user-driven.

In a recent post called How to Evolve Your Irrelevant Corporate Website, Jeremiah Owyang talks about his vision for enhancing the credibility and relevance of your corporate website by inviting open participation from your customers on the site. He says, in part:

"Content will have both negative and positive views about your products
This one is hard to swallow, but how do you build the most trust? By being open, authentic, and transparent to the marketplace. We know from research that the highest degree of trust comes from those ‘like me’, a savvy marketer will allow content to appear from peers, customers, and the market. These will not always be a product rave, in fact it may be downright criticism, the goal? To take that feedback, and demonstrate in public how you will improve your offerings in plain view."

A lot of companies find themselves in the position of having forums, discussion groups and developer communities that are not sponsored by them or hosted under their domain. A lot of them probably don't take these networks seriously. Jeremiah is saying, though, that this is wishful thinking. We've always known that word of mouth and independent opinions are more powerful than formal marketing programs. Web 2.0 is just the latest reflection of that reality.

But what if a few disgruntled customers (or competitors posing as customers) post one-sided rants on the site? Well, they can already do that on sites you have no control over (and less visibility into). And you can always delete outright lies or spam on your own site. (I delete a couple of spam posts on this site almost every day.) The key is that if you believe your product or service is good then you should trust that your customers will, in the main, say so. And if you believe that, why not give them a soap box from which to say it loud?

 
And of course this is not just about marketing credibility. Becoming more user-driven and allowing your customers to talk openly and directly about your products in an open forum may also give you the insights you need to make your products better. Imagine that!