Seth Godin, author, entrepreneur and all-around marketing guru has a really great blog that I receive updates from. They are usually concise and right on – the one below is about being different vs. remarkable. Paul and I talk about this a lot lately when we get into our post-modern discussions about how nothing is novel in this day and age.
We are both excited to start something new together some day – working at Starting Artists, Inc. and now in the Peace Corps together has shown us how much we like working as a team and how complementary our skills really are. Yet, nowadays it’s hard to think of how you can make or do something so different. Instead, as we have with Mujeres: Cambia, we’re focusing on being the most remarkable that we can be. We know that Mujeres: Cambia is not necessarily that unique since there are other folks doing paper jewelry but we can be the most talked about as a result of our quality and our story.
Here’s to being remarkable!
From Seth’s Blog:
Different or remarkable?
Differentation by marketers has a long and obvious history. When you see competition, you differentiate.
Buy mine, I can prove it is different.
They offer X, I offer Y. They cost this, I cost that.
The thing is, differentiation is selfish. It’s the act of the marketer with intense interest in his segment of the market, it’s inside baseball, deeply thought through reasons why someone should buy my thing instead of their thing.
Most customers, of course, don’t have the same selfish view of the market, the same obsessed knowledge of features and benefits.
Differentiation is not the purple cow. This is in fact a willful misreading of what I’ve been writing about, usually by people who haven’t read it…
Remarkable has nothing to do with the marketer. Remarkable is in the eye of the consumer, the person who ‘remarks.’ If people talk about what you’re doing, it’s remarkable, by definition.
The goal, then, isn’t to draw some positioning charts and announce that you have differentiated your product. No, the opportunity is to actually create something that people choose to talk about, regardless of what the competition is doing.