Don't Try to Be All Things to All Customers

Or else you'll come across as not caring about one or more customer segments and needs. When it comes to branding, less from you is more. An additional lesson for companies is to stop trying to be a bad copy of some other company. "Me too" is the biggest branding sin of all - you're doomed for failure, especially when there are already two companies going at it in one category.

The idea of picking one thing and sticking with it is valid on the service end of things. You position your company by making a statement with your message, and delivering on that statement with your service. It sounds simple, but we know it's easy to get in trouble by over promising on both counts.

Al Ries provides plenty of examples of unfocused brands in a post at Brand Strategy Insider about social media not the answer to weak brands. A memorable example for those in the service business is:

What happened at Citigroup? Same old story. It started with Citibank, its consumer banking operation. Then it bought Travelers (insurance), Smith Barney (stock brokerage) and Salomon Brothers (investment banking.) In other words, Citigroup started as a bank in competition with the other major banks in America and then tried to fight on four fronts: banking, insurance, stock brokerage and investment banking. Not a good strategy.

They may seem like adjacent businesses to you, but to a customer, they spell very different support and service needs. Imagine your day job suddenly becoming so big that you cannot do it all. You're stretched in so many directions that you're at the point of losing track of what you're doing.

The same happens with brands.

Today you can increase sales and profits by:

• serving your existing customers better
• trimming your product line and offering only what you can truly support well
• being on the same page with customers as to what your product/service means to them

More focused means that you have one conversation going and many possibilities within it for your customers - and employees - to become evangelists on behalf of your brand.

Let's say you started the company by dominating a category. Why did you stop embracing that position and moved away from what you did best? You did that despite the fact that even today customers continue to associate you with that brand position.

Companies do that when instead of innovating from the inside, they buy other companies that seem a good deal as a growth strategy in new directions. In other words, they think differentiating is a good strategy for the business, and neglect to take the existing brand equity into account.

To continue with the Citigroup example. If they had expanded on their consumer banking operations before Commerce Bank took the number one spot in retail banking for customer relationships (before the Bank's demise and sale, they were considered a Maverick brand), they would have been able to get up close and personal and offer amazing service.

Instead, they expanded into insurance - not a core business, and with quite different customer needs - stock brokerage, and investment banking. What all of these service lines or lines of business have in common is money. But they express very differing models in terms of customer relationships and information needs. Not to mention that they speak to different customer segments in terms of value.

In the service business, when it comes to customers, it fundamentally comes down to two things:

1. how you serve customers
   
2. how you communicate with them

The more audiences and segments you have - which depend on your product or service lines - the higher the complexity in delivering to all the same standards when it comes to meeting customer service expectations and communication needs.

That in turns weakens your overall brand position. Customers are the best source of referral a business has. With social media, that can turn out to be a big win if your customers talk about your business in good terms, or loss if they're at a loss on what to say about you.

The lesson: don't try to be all things to all customers.

Do you think it's the human innate desire to please all that comes into play here? Why is there still such a gap between what companies think they can deliver, and what they deliver?

© 2006-2009 Valeria Maltoni. All rights reserved.

Comments

[Stuart Foster]

If you can't do something well, when you have other things that you can do well...why do you continue to push on multiple fronts.

I'm all for trying new things, but if a strategy is clearly failing? Why bother continuing.

[Pier Luca Santoro]

It'a astonising how this applies to media industry in general and more to newspapapers that still make a product for everyone ["quotidiani generalisti"].
Take care.
Pier Luca

[Courtney]

I agree with you and Stuart that you shouldn't try to work on multiple fronts. We should all take a lesson from WWII Germany on that part. You should focus on what you are good at and expand from that if you feel comfortable. One way to expand while staying in your comfort zone is to have a partnership with another person or company that has good standing in the 'fronts' you are weak on. For instance, White Horse is doing a webinar on how Public Relations can benefit from social media monitoring. But we don't say do this or you won't survive. We offer the option to create a partnership with a company with strong social media monitoring. We at White Horse just want to show you the possibilities.
Feel free to register for this webinar here: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/596160673

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Stuart - so pleased to hear from you. Most importantly, make a decision. Most failures are due to lack of direction because nobody was willing to put a stake in the ground.

@Pier Luca - yes, and everyone is chasing after the same eyeballs, aren't they? Because the market is big, right? Right.

@Courtney - a war reference, interesting, and true. How does the seminar fit into the conversation? An example with call to action? Hmmmm.

[Akash Sharma]

Thanks for sharing this post Valeria,we can have a good conversation on this one here.When it comes to expanding some brands forget what got them into the business and try to focus on some other things which look promising but aren't.
I think the best example of a brand which has stuck to its core growth structure and still expanded with quite a few acquisitions would be Google as it keeps working on becoming better and better with the search and doing some other stuff as well in the meanwhile.

[Valeria Maltoni]

I think the jury ma still be out on Google. I'm seeing a lot of activity, and a lot of discussions about the potential cons of this activity in terms of what got the company to where it is today.

Specifically, there is a conversation around content farms and how Google (busy launching all kinds of products at the moment )needs to take notice that is getting pretty lively recently. That hits the company and its search model right at the core.

[Andrew @ WeBuildYourBlog.com]

Thanks for sharing. This is really a good post. It is really true to not try pleasing everybody, that path leads to ruin. Be original and be yourself.

[Cindy Stephenson]

Great advice and it applies in so many ways. With my own blog for example, some of the advice I've received is, it's your personal blog, write whatever you want, just add a different category. I disagree, and am trying to continually keep it more focused on using social media to grow your business. Most of my traffic is passers-by, and I feel that the more consistently focused my posts are, the better my chances of attracting subscribers interested in that topic. A challenge though as I feel I must narrow it down even further, since there are an awful lot of people blogging about the value of social media to small business.