How,Kill,Your,Competitors,Prod marketing How To Kill Your Competitors Product And Get A Great Big Lau
Awhile ago, I got an email from one of the "gurus" I follow and it shocked me. The gist of it was this person wanted to trade services for a household item.To say it floored me would be an understatement.What was worse was a few days later t Automation technologies represent a fundamental aspect of any modern industry. The major types of industrial automation solutions, such as DCS, PLC, SCADA, and MES, are used on a large-scale in process and discrete industries.DCS technologie
Ill never forget the day one of my competitors begancopying and imitating our products and services! At first it was flattering or at least Itold myself that, in order to not get flaming mad. I kept telling myself, its competition thatmakes the world go-round. After several months of seeing similar ads, same size, samepublications, same frequency and then showing up at the same tradeshows, Idecided to do something about it. I didso in an up front, aggressive, in your face, humiliating, embarrassing, andhowever legit way, that ended my competitions tradeshow appearances once andforever!! I knew our product was far more superior and much morestable than that of our competitors. Itwas irritating to see them capitalize on our advertising efforts and piggyback on our success by having a me too product. Reading and hearing their claims of how ourproduct was trash and nothing but garbage caused me to take action. My company used their negative comments andturned them into an advertising campaign, that led to the demise of theirproduct and we enjoyed every minute of it. Due to such similarity in our product and our competition,we often received bitter phone calls about their product. So many calls came in each month that we gotsmart and started offering a discount on our product if they wanted toswitch! All they had to do was send ustheir non-working competing product and we discounted our product (usually 30%,sometimes more if needed) and shipped it to them with a full warranty guaranteeand support. By offering the switch it was doing several things for us. 1 It made us look good, better than our competition. Customers couldnt believe we would actuallytake a dead trade-in for our superior working product! Knowing that we didnt manufacture theinferior product astounded them. 2 It increased our sales. By fielding the unhappy camper calls that were coming into our officeby mistake, we turned them into positive happy campers. 3 Our reputation as the good guys became even morepronounced. Customers throughout ourindustry were singing praises about our customer service and our productpopularity. 4 Customers began to advertise our product for us. Many of our customers supplied us withpersonal written testimonies that were then used in trade magazine publicationsand displayed at industry tradeshows. As if this wasnt enough, we then began to publicize ouroffer while attending national and international tradeshows. This was by far the most effective and bestkill your competition move; weve ever done in our entire 21 years ofbusiness. Remember, they were claiming our product was trash, nothingbut garbage. If you listen closelyenough to your competitions rhetoric, you can glean some pretty niftyideas. Especially if youre inclined tofire back with some in your face type claims and back them up with soundaction and documentation. Its beenreported that documentation beats conversation and we had hard-core proofthat our competitions product was, well TRASH! The best in your face action we hung an acrylic (seethrough) trash can from the top of our booth at all tradeshow appearances thatsaid, CAN THE LINK! (The Link was thename of their product). Stuffed insidethe trashcan were gobs of their product!! Jammed in the can, hanging over the edges and dangling 10 feet in theair for all to see. It was so effectivethat customers were taking pictures of it and giving us high fives as a wayof support and encouragement. At oneparticular show it was becoming such an attraction that the Executive Directorof the tradeshow asked me to take it down. I asked him if we were violating any tradeshow policies, he saidno. So, I politely refused and informedhim of the nasty tactics of the competition and let the director know it wasour intention to increase the pressure at upcoming shows. We would do this by hanging more trashcansand get larger ones if needed. To add to the humility some customers had decided (all ontheir own doing) to wear bright pink t-shirts to the tradeshow that saidnegative things about the Link. Evenworse than just walking around displaying the shirts, they stood outside theirbooth until the owner of the competing company wrote them a refund check! That my friends, is the way to kill your competitors productand get a great big laugh while doing it!
How,Kill,Your,Competitors,Prod