How Many Banks Have the Same Strategy?
There are 16,000 Financial Institutions in the US – How many do you think have a unique product differentiator? 90% Say they differentiate on the same thing- customer service- Blair Goulet
To grab the attention of potential buyers your product or service needs to be striking, relevant and engaging?otherwise it will get lost in the clutter and noise of everyday life. So how do you think these companies differentiate themselves in what they claim and more importantly in what they deliver?
The short answer is they often don’t.
Going to market with an undifferentiated message, or one that is so generic that it could easily describe the service of your competitors, is a recipe for getting relegated to the margins. Yet, many companies continue to pump out messages and products that immediately blur to the background. Ask yourself: How much of the information you receive through email, internet, radio or TV do you actually remember? Two to three messages from that pot of over 5,000 you receive every day. Most of the communication we receive is filtered out before it even registers!
A study by market research firm Yankelovich estimates that a person living in a city 30 years ago saw up to 2,000 advertising messages a day. They estimate the number today to be 5,000. That’s a horrendous amount information and general nonsense you need to break through in order to get heard.
Now put on your consumer cap. Twelve women and men locked in an energized room for twelve hours could write a highly differentiating vision and mission statement for a bank. They could also come up with a way to use the technology of smart phones and tablets to improve a banks customer service.
How can a bank be striking, relevant and engaging? What would you most want from your bank?
You can create a strong differentiated business strategy by answering these Four Questions and aligning your organization to achieving them.
- Create something new and unique. Meaningful differentiation creates new revenue and increased customer loyalty.
- Raise the bar to make it more difficult for competitors to match you.
- Reduce a consumer frustration that they have come to accept because your industry has ignored it.
- Eliminate the unnecessary. By doing so you can reduce costs enough to pay for meaningful product the differentiations.
The creation of meaningful differentiation enables customer retention and growth of profitable revenue streams. It should be near the top of every leaders list of priorities. -Blair Goulet
Blair is a faculty member and key contributor to the Masters Certificate in Sales Leadership Program at Schulich where he teaches corporations how to better align the disparate parts of their company into a well oiled directed machine that is fuelled by its ability to create better customer value propositions through customer insight. He is President of Oxygen, a boutique strategy firm focusing on strategies for innovation, corporate alignment, and exceptional revenue growth.
For more on Mastering Sales Leadership and making it work for your company
click here
As president of Open Source he consulted with over 300 financial service companies and grew the business dramatically, He served as COO of SOLCORP and spent 15 years in senior management positions with Xerox. He completed his Executive Education at the Wharton School, Kellogg Graduate School of Management and the University Of Chicago Graduate School Of Business.
For more on aligning corporate structures to customer needs in a knowledge economy
click here
or email your thoughts and questions to
editor@community.seec.schulich.yorku.ca to continue the conversation!
Comments
Add New Comment