You Are What Your Customers Call You

Story posted on 59 02, 2007

The other day I spent a large amount of time working on messaging and positioning with a young and successful company. One of the challenges they were having was the comparison between the robust product they deliver and the simpler products on the market that solve only part of the problem. They are stuck because of this they were stuck between a bunch of simple “me-toos” and enterprise apps that took 12 months to deploy. So they decided it was time to create a new space. And our first response was NO!

You see, this company has a ton of customers. So we asked the customers three key questions:

What does the product do?
What do you call the product?
When you were looking for a solution, what were you looking for?

Turns out, the customers thought they were the same as the simple products but much better. And they called them all the same thing. You see, no matter what you want your product to be called, your customers may call it something different. And chances are your potential customers are calling it the same thing. We aren't saying that you can't create a new space. But we are saying, if you can, dominate the hill your customers are on and then educate them in order to move along with you to the next horizon.