How To Change Your Marketing Game

Most companies focus on competing against known rivals and gaining market share by incremental improvements to product, service, or price. Winning that game is difficult because every team is using the same playbook.

To break out of that traditional pattern of thinking, you need to change the game and create an entirely new market space.

How?

Creating a new market space requires you to look across the conventionally defined boundaries of your competition and your product or service to find new opportunities or unoccupied territories where you can offer your customers new value. Let me share a few examples.

Look at substitute industries

Consumers make choices and weigh substitutes for every decision. Oftentimes, those substitutions are not between you and your known competitors.

A great example of this is Home Depot. They created a whole new category of DIY customers because they realized that their biggest competitor wasn’t another big hardware store. For ordinary homeowners, it was a decision to hire a general contractor or do it themselves.

With this realization, Home Depot put its marketing efforts towards targeting people who wanted to save money but weren’t sure if they could really do it themselves. They recruited sales associates that had significant experience, such as carpenters and painters. They offered in-store clinics to teach customers how-to skills like plumbing and wiring, and they launched their “Let’s do this” campaign to motivate homeowners to take on do-it-yourself projects.

They changed the game by positioning their brand in a new way; not just a place to get tools, but a place to get expert support and be empowered to do your own home repair.

Evolve your offering to create new demand

Product or service evolution is where many brands have been successful in creating new demand by changing what they offer into something completely new or delivering it in a new way. Here are a few classic examples:

• Believe it or not, it wasn’t until the founder of Birds Eye became inspired during a Canadian fishing trip in 1915 and then influenced the entire supply chain process, that frozen vegetables became a significant grocery category.
• The introduction of Apple’s iPad created a new category of tablet computers that didn’t exist previously. Now they are a tech staple for nearly every student across America.
• Uber revolutionized taxi services to create a new on-demand ride-sharing category.
• Red Bull changed the beverage category to include drinks focused on energy instead of taste or refreshment.
• Netflix changed how we consume video from a traditional physical rental to on-demand digital viewing.
• Green Mountain Coffee introduced the idea of K-cups creating a new category for coffee beans, equipment, and the single-serve experience.

Looking back at these examples, they might seem obvious now, but before they existed no one was expecting them, which is what made them revolutionary.

Get started with fresh thinking

If you want to unearth something new that will completely change the game for your brand, start with these questions:

• Where else are customers finding solutions that solve a similar problem to our product or service? What can we apply from that industry?
• What can we add to our offering to give it more value (think: services to products, products to services, packaging or combining things together, etc.)?
• What new buyers could use what we make or do?
• What broad trends could reshape our products/services or the way we deliver them?
• How can we deliver what we make or do differently (smaller, bigger, personalized, combined with something else, etc.)?
• Does our product or service have a different or additional/potential value than how we sell it now?
• How can we promote our product or service for a new use or in a new context?
• What new trend can we create that fits with where the world is today?

Remember, not everything new is good

When you come up with a new idea, make sure you test it before you put it into the broad market so you don’t end up with an epic failure. Customers (even a small sample) can usually indicate pretty quickly if something new is worth the effort of moving it ahead.

Unfortunately, some novel ideas just don’t work. For example, Google Glass failed because consumers didn’t understand it, the product was buggy, and the launch was rushed—which all added up to disaster for creating a new category.

Other times, companies move too quickly without gathering important customer input during the planning process. You might remember Olestra, the no-fat ingredient a few snack food brands incorporated into their products. However, as consumers tried the new items, they found out the fat alternative was also a laxative—something that is not a positive association for most food brands. And if you watched this year’s Super Bowl, you might have seen the Search Party ad by Ring which got a ton of backlash from viewers due to fears around personal surveillance and privacy—a topic that was top of mind especially in light of ICE raids that were happening around the nation. Paying attention to what’s happening in the world is just as important as paying attention to new ideas related to your products or services.

When you find something fresh and new for your brand that fits with where the world is moving, then you will have a whole new game to play—and will leave your competition behind in the old game.