Here’s another post in my continuing series on Crafting Your Brand Promise.
Small business owners get a great deal of advice about how to avoid commoditization–how to bundle products and services that add value, thereby increasing the price you can charge.
But some small businesses have a real edge in offering their customers a low-cost, high value product or service. This happens most often when a new technology makes a formerly difficult and/or higher cost service available at a much lower cost and with greater ease.
One example might be stamps.com. This is a service that replaces a postage meter and other mailing expenses and hassles for small business owners.
Or another service, which I recently signed up for, is carbonite.com. It’s an incredibly simple, powerful, and very low-cost solution to back up all of my business computer files in the cloud, while also giving us access to all of our files from any laptop, computer, iPad or smart phone device. It’s cheap. And friendly, And powerful. But a BIG part of their branding is the low cost. I have used a number of other backup services in the past, but none provided this level of coverage and ease of use at a comparable price. So my cost was the key feature in my buying decision.
I have been using many AI tools in my business lately. One I love is SlideSpeak. It is a simple platform that allows you to “interrogate” any document–Word, .pdf, spreadsheet, PowerPoint–that is, ask it questions about the document. As I build courses for The Whale Hunters Institute, I upload the basic PowerPoint slide to SlideSpeak and get a short and a long summary, a list of topics in the document, a list of key issues, and a quiz–that is, a multiple choice quiz with, say, six questions with answers. The quizzes are remarkably good and timesaving. All of this material helps create the requisite introductory materials for a course or lesson as well as the quiz. Finally, this program generates presentations from any text that you can customize and download into PowerPoint.
If you are in competition with a higher cost provider of your product or service, cost may be a significant way to consider positioning your brand. You will have to have a vigorous marketing strategy to bring your offer to a very great many people in order to be successful in this kind of strategy. But if you are prepared to embark on a social selling campaign, you should consider the cost of your service as a major brand builder.
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