Separate Your Business from the Competition

Here you are, you have created a company to sell your great new product or service. You might even have been issued a patent. So, you are ready for sales. Or are you? Your patent is a wonderful protection but does not mean that there isn’t another patented product out there that might provide similar benefits to your product, a product that has been selling for a few years. So, what should you do?

Create a real separation between your business and everyone or anyone.

Where should you start?  Research, research and more research!

There are a few areas of research that are important to you as the business owner: Personal research is the process to find the basic core of your “Brand”. Who are you? What are you? What are your products strengths? What are the weaknesses? Can you identify the threats to your business? What are the benefits, both tangible and intangible? Believe it or not the core difference in your business is you.  Your dream and passion has to come out in the development of not only your product but also your company. This internal research will probably be the largest part of the corporate culture of your brand.

Qualitative research investigates the why, how, what, where, and when your prospect consumer might buy or not buy your product or service.  Thus giving you insight in possibility of sales before we you spend a lot of time and effort. How many times do you hear of a product that was supposed to be the next “White Bread” but didn’t succeed? Many times its because the business owner marketed the product to the wrong demographic group. All major corporations use qualitative research to improve their products and advertising message before presenting to public.

Competitive research gives you the opportunity to learn as much as you can about your competition, the latest developments in your and associated industries, about parallel industries, possible innovation predictions, basically everything that might impact the development of your company/product.

Ideally a professional research or independent professional library can provide you the best results. They have direct access to articles and publications that are not available on the Internet. Using the Internet will not typically yield the quality, depth and breadth of information you need.  The research department at your local public library or university would be much better as they tend to carry trade magazine articles and industry-specific association reports that are not available on the web unless you are a member of that organization.

The research will give you insight that you might not have thought of on your own, also, hopefully revealing mistakes that you can now avoid. 

Read very carefully and highlight everything that might appear similar to your product with one color and highlight everything that is different with a second color. In addition, highlight what you find unique with a third color. Next, extract and combine everything that you have highlighted. 

Be very careful and do not take shortcuts in the development research of your product, service or even your company because all of the various research processes will help you find the difference between building a struggling business or a successful corporation.