Differentiators: What Makes a Product Different? What Doesn’t?

What Doesn’t? Having passion for your product doesn’t make it different. Hard work doesn’t make a product different. Random and disparate use of beautiful packaging, on trend colors and catchy brand names with clever supporting copy don’t make a product different. We’ve seen numerous brand owners create glorious products that leverage years of experience and hard work along with a lot of money. The products perform, look great, taste great and are well priced. Despite the brand owner’s rants and raves against the lack of retailer and consumer interest – these undifferentiated products usually die a quick death. If you want to recreate the wheel that’s ok, just make it a better wheel. Liquid Death Mountain Water is a great example of a better wheel (more on this later).

So, what attributes make a product noticeably different? Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to this question and the answer is often more art than science. You can be a very smart and well-spoken person, but without a keen business sense and creativity you’re handicapped. Adding further complexity, is the range of areas where unique attributes can be developed to ensure new products have relevant and noticeable points of differentiation. Visit the Ghost Tree Sales blog for discussions around the latest product development best practices. For now, here is a quick snapshot of attributes to consider:

• Physical Attributes (Product Design): Materials/ingredients, shape, form, color, texture, copy, structure, sound, taste, odor, space, density etc. Making these different is the most direct way to differentiate your product. Whether they are relevant to consumers and noticeable is another story.

• Packaging Attributes: Badly dressed people are less noticed and initial impressions may be negative. Same with CPG products. Enough said.

• Psychological Attributes: This is positioning and targeting of the heart & mind (emotions & intellect). This is where marketing becomes art and can be very powerful. The personality you create for your product and how the product speaks to consumers can be a very strong point of differentiation. When considering psychological attributes, you need to look at things like physiology, safety (fear), belonging & love (sex), esteem/pride, cognitive attributes, aesthetics, self-actualization and transcendence (spiritual). Study Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The further up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs the more emotive the needs and thus the more powerful they become at luring consumer to your product with where they become incredible loyalty and passion.

• Social Attributes: These are less selfish needs but instead are ones that target the consumers’ sense of community and giving back: ethics, sustainability, responsibilities, charity, taboos, power & ecological needs are good examples.

• Process Attributes: These attributes will support other attributes. For example, if you can produce your product very efficiently you may be able to sell at a very competitive price. Or, if you have discovered a unique media vehicle by which to advertising your product you can be different. Generally, process attributes consist of things like selling, marketing, manufacturing and designing.

• Price Attributes: What you charge can differentiate your product. Interestingly, you don’t have to be low priced to be different. If you have done a good job making your product different you can deploy price skimming at launch which can make you highly profitable. Look at Perfect Bar as an example, they were the first to sell a refrigerated nutrition bar and they did so at a high price.

We still haven’t answered the question; “what makes a product different?”. Or, what makes a product different enough? We have identified the attributes that can make a product different. The answer is any one of these attributes or a collection of these attributes integrated together can make your product different. As a rule of thumb, you want to make as many of your product’s attributes unique so that collectively they work together to position your product away from competing products.

Below is an example of the original differentiated product within the canned water space and a more recent competitor. Liquid Death did a good job of layering a bunch of differentiators on top of packaged water while Tour Water just has just one differentiator:

Physical Attributes:

• Liquid Death: Mountain Water

• Tour Water: Deep Well Water (as opposed to shallow well water?)

Packaging:

• Liquid Death: Water in a recyclable aluminum can with doom metal graphics & copy

• Tour Water: Water in a recyclable aluminum can with rock concert T-shirt graphics & copy

Psychological Attributes:

• Liquid Death: Make bottled water cool by leveraging on trend doom metal imagery (What “Ghost” is to music, “Liquid Death” is to packaged water). Add in esteem, pride & belonging

• Tour Water: Make packaged water cool by directly leveraging rock bands. Add in esteem, pride & belonging

Social Attributes:

• Liquid Death: Recyclable cans

• Liquid Death: Recyclable cans + water from local sources to cut down the freight effect (what exactly is freight effect?)

So, as you can see above, Liquid Death used differentiators across multiple attributes and was able to do so as the first to market with water in a can. Leveraging layers of consistent differentiators, the brand positioned itself in the “cool” whitespace away from stoic traditional packaged water. The list of attributes supporting “cool” are brand name, doom metal imagery, cheeky copy, colors, packaging material and breakthrough consumer advertising.

Monster Tour Water is obviously trying to take a cut of Liquid Death’s action with a me-too product with only one differentiator…locally sourced deep well water. One can argue all other attributes are like Liquid Death’s. Time will tell if Monster (Coca-Cola) can use their distribution might to force this poorly differentiated product into consumers’ hands. They were able to do so when they launched a me-too product copying Red Bull by essentially buying the market. Interestingly, Pepsico launched Aquafina in a can which is closer to stoic traditional packaged water…it’s just in a can. Not sure who will buy Liquid Death…Coca-Cola or Pepsico.

When do you Differentiate?

Ideally, you want to launch a product that is well differentiated from the start. The hunt for differentiation ideally should start during the ideation phase and then continue through the entire product development process. But you can differentiate at any time. Here are two differentiation scenarios that can work:

Launch and Learn: Sweet Prairie Haskap found a berry that is virtually unknown; the haskap berry. They then spent time selling a haskap berry juice at farmers markets in California where they identified an unmet consumer need for a natural great tasting strong anti-inflammatory. The founder took this insight and started marketing Sweet Prairie Haskap as a very strong anti-inflammatory that also tastes great. The reason to believe haskap is a strong anti-inflammatory is because it has more anthocyanins than any other fruit or vegetable. Sweet Prairie Haskap started with a unique product and then took the time to identify its optimal positioning.

The Facelift: As your product moves through its lifecycle there are plenty of externalities that can make it less different and less relevant to consumers. Along with just getting tired and old, competition is an obvious externality as is the aging of your core market who may move on to more relevant products. Relaunching a brand/product with a new set of attributes is an opportunity to reposition the brand away from competition along with updating and refreshing the look of the brand (facelift). A product/brand relaunch should involve changing all attributes of the product and thus essentially be treated like a new product launch. It’s not enough to just give the product a packaging facelift with a new logo and on trend colors. Check our blog for the latest best practices for refreshing and relaunching a brand successfully to restore it to growth and profitability.

How do you make your product different? You need to be BOTH product and consumer focused - it doesn’t matter which comes first. Liquid Death is a good example of a product focused launch rather than one driven solely by identifying an unmet consumer need and then developing a product to meet that need. People need water. That’s a given. Liquid Death just changed the dressing and graphics to make it cool. Well done.

It is also advisable to subdivide the product development challenge/problem into many separate parts, the challenge does not change, but your perception of it does which can lead to new and innovative ideas. Look at each product attribute separately and brainstorm around how to make them different/better. This is often easier than a macro approach which involves looking at the entire product to make it different. Often a customer’s value proposition is greatly improved by the addition of many minor innovations (layers) that together yield a noticeable difference and ultimately a competitive advantage.