Social Business: Who are my competitors if my product or service is so unique?
At first glance, social entrepreneurship can seem so unique in terms of the business model and products and services offered, that you feel you don’t have any competitors. But in fact, they’re the people closest to you (after your employees). Your customers!
What you will learn:
Who your competitors are in the social entrepreneurship space?
The three areas of social entrepreneurship competition.
How they compare to the buyers journey.
When you create a socially responsible company and brand, in the beginning you may think that you have no competitors.
“My products and services are so unique that I don’t have competitors.”
“No one else in the market is doing what I do and the way that I’m doing it, so I have no competitors.”
These are comments that are heard a lot in the social entrepreneurship space.
Yet, you do have competitors!
Your customers are your competition. How? You are competing for their attention, time and money.
You can compare these three areas to your buyer’s journey.
Attention: This is when your customer is doing their research for a problem they want to solve. In the buyer’s journey this is the equivalent of the awareness stage. How are you going to grab their attention? Educate them on your product or service and how it will support them? Or even if your product or service is so unique how are you going to get their attention and essentially tell them, I have a solution to a problem you didn’t even know you had?
Time: Once you grab their initial attention how are you going to keep them interested in getting to know more about your product or service? This is when the customer moves into the consideration stage. Here the client has completed their research and is now committed to solving their problem.
Money: Why should they decide to spend the budget they have for goods and services on your brand? This is the decision stage of the buyer’s journey where the customer is ready to make a purchase.
My own thought process as a customer.
For example, you’re a brand selling tea. You source your tea leaves directly from local farmers. You sell in an eco-friendly package, pay fair or above wages, and invest back some of your profits for farmer training or land conservation.
I love this company!
I search your website to find more. I want to read your story, so I go to your our story page and then
I want to find out who you are so I go to your about us page.
I’m feeling inspired and I want to be part of your brand.
Firstly, though before I can do all this I need to find out about your brand.
Which means you have to get media publicity in some way so I can find you. If I can’t what’s the purpose of you going into all this effort and setting up your website.
Most social entrepreneurs fall into the mind trap believing that because their company is so unique that somehow, they don’t need to advertise and people are going to somehow magically find them.
That’s not the case. Marketing should be your top priority.
You can do this by trying to get publicity in all forms of media. Approach freelance journalists with a brief on your company, what you do, how and why. It’s likely to gain you a lot of free publicity.
As a freelance journalist myself in Australia I frequently place call-outs on sourcebottle and find a lot of people for my stories there.
When it comes to my hard-earned cash. I want to know that if I’m going to pay a bit more for your tea, than the one in my local supermarket, that means I might be taking away money from my budget that I would use to buy something else.
Therefore, I need to be persuaded as to why I should do so. How does your tea contribute to my values in life, my carbon footprint, my compassion and humanity, my environmental activism and my choice of tea and coffee? So, you’re also competing with my coffee intake here!
A great way to do all this is to share real-life case studies of people that already consume your tea. I want to know and feel their experiences. See how it fits into their lifestyle and why.
And subsequently understand:
How can your tea enhance my health?
How can it affect me emotionally?
Make my money mean something more?
Happy marketing!
