Product Differentiation When Small Things Count
Everything useful has plenty of competition, making purely objective choices difficult. A small thing can have a disproportionate effect on a decision. Here are two examples of a tipping point around a small thing, one that resulted in a replacement and the other in a new acquisition.
Like many people, I still read a morning newspaper, even though the one I’ve read for some years now is not much of one, and shrinking like many are these days. Still, it was convenient, easy to manage, and easier to use. After all, how can someone screw up paper?
Then one day not too long ago, the newspaper got into a distribution agreement with another newspaper, resulting in the original carrier being dropped. The original carrier wrapped the paper in protective plastic, and it never got wet from rain or, more often, the neighbor’s lawn sprinklers. The new carrier stopped doing that, and after one day too many of having to microwave the small newspaper in order to read it, I decided it wasn’t worth the hassle any more, and now get my daily news online. A small thing, trying to save a fraction of a cent by not protecting the newspaper wasn’t enough to sustain loyalty, and I made a major change in early morning reading habits. The frustration of dealing with the problem overcame the inertia of routine.
A positive small thing was when I was test driving a new car, during which I moved the sun visor to the side window. Like many cars today, the door is considerably wider than the sun visor, which doesn’t block the sun when it is low to the left and slightly behind the driver. This sun visor had a sliding extension that was surprisingly easy to slide back and then forward again for swinging back to its parking station. Another surprising little thing was that the sun visor’s locking dowel was oval instead of round, meaning that it would lock in place without rattling. Nice touches, which I mentioned to the salesman. If the car manufacturer paid as much attention to the rest of the car as they did on the sun visor then it would be a good bet to have better reliability and require less maintenance on the things that I cannot see directly.
The lesson here is that the differentiator between highly comparable products or services is exceedingly small, and can’t be predicted in any rational way. There is no single point solution to building a successful product or service, but paying attention to the small details is certainly one requirement.
© Copyright 2009 Chuck Brooks for FutureWare SCG
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Tags: attention to detail, overcomming inertia, product differentiation