When Your Firm’s Differentiation REPELS Your Customers

I constantly preach that firms should not adopt “me too” messaging. Ideally, a firm’s messaging should not copy its competitors, but should instead state why the firm is better than all others, and why all the other firms are worthless in comparison.

But when a firm differentiates itself, there is always a danger that the firm will forget one important thing: how will the customers react to the firm’s differentiated messaging? Will the differentiation turn the customers off?

Trust me, it can happen.

A multinational’s great idea that backfired

Some time ago, I was working for a multinational firm that clearly differentiated itself from all of its competitors. This multinational had been around for some time and was known for its particular tone.

I’m not going to reveal the name of the particular multinational firm, or the tone it radiated.

The IBM illustrative example

But the tone used by that multinational was just as powerful as the tone IBM exuded in the mid-20th century.

In the 1950s and 1960s, “Big Blue” meant a particular style.

IBM acquired an image of an army of men (this was the mid-20th century, after all), all wearing blue suits and white shirts.

Even as late as the 1980s (and beyond), the men of IBM had the look:

The men of IBM didn’t wear facial hair and wore only white shirts….IBM wanted to make sure they did not offend a prospect or a customer. Research had shown them that some people don’t like facial hair…so no facial hair. Research had also shown that people assume a degree of professionalism with a white shirt that may not be assumed if a person wore a blue or yellow shirt. So white shirts it is!

From https://bulanetwork.com/4004-dont-be-offensive-ibms-white-shirt-strategy/

Back to my multinational

Let’s leave the theoretical example and return to the situation at my distinctive multinational.

Now the multinational that employed me long ago didn’t have a “blue suit-white shirt” dress code, but in other ways the multinational had a distinctive tone that radiated from the executive level down to the ranks of the worker bees like myself.

• We all embodied this tone.
• We spoke in this tone.
• And our marketing messages also spoke in this tone, regardless of the market segment to which our marketers were speaking.
• Even if the market segment had a very different tone than the one the multinational was projecting. (Imagine the Military Police selling the Vietnam War in Haight-Ashbury.)

When my multinational sent its marketing collateral out to prospects who used a very different tone than that used by the multinational, the prospects hated it. The marketing department received multiple complaints from salespeople whose clients were repelled by the material.

One of my coworkers surveyed the negative campaign reaction with dismay. The coworker had joined the company after the marketing tone was adopted. My coworker asked a simple question: “What type of customer focus group testing was conducted before we used this tone on a marketing campaign?”

“We didn’t conduct any focus group testing,” my coworker was told. “We didn’t need any.”

In retrospect, I guess we did need to test the messaging before we delivered it.

Four ways to balance customer focus and a firm’s distinctive messaging

If you’ve been reading recent Bredemarket blog posts, you’re probably not surprised that this is turning into yet another blog post about customer focus. But how do you balance a firm’s distinctive differentiators with a focus on its customers?

1. First, you need to ensure that you are truly focusing on the customer, and not what you think the customer is. If a military police officer were to try to put himself in the shoes of a hippie to imagine what the hippie’s life was like, the MP would fail utterly.
2. Second, you need to ensure that your messaging to the customer is something the customer cares about. It’s fine to adopt your “big blue” tone, but make sure that your messaging resonates with the customer.
3. Third, your messaging should also explain why you do what you do. Why did IBM create System/360 computers, after all?
4. Fourth, your messaging needs some smarts. Just because your prospect bought a refrigerator on Monday doesn’t mean that they’ll want a second refrigerator on Tuesday.

If you follow these and similar steps, then it (almost) doesn’t matter if your firm’s generic messaging is antithetical to the values of your prospects. Because your prospects won’t get generic messaging, but messaging that is focused for them.