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 very 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 wrote recently about nimble.com as a category buster for social CRM with a sales focus. It’s an option that simply destroys its competition on price. It seems to me they are building the brand on value and ease of use, but certainly cost to users is a major feature that they could choose to make more prominent in their branding.
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.
