Monday, February 23, 2009

Does what you do reflect your uniqueness i.e. your distinctive advantage?

The world's best companies are creations of distinctive advantage. Many search and find the distinctive advantage and then use that to produce products, train their people and market themselves. Relentlessly. Such that when one utters a company’s name, you know their products. Equity, Safcom, Microsoft, Virgin, Apple etc. To a certain extent, this is also true for most of the developed nations.

You hear people saying that we are all different and that is exactly what distinctive advantage is. Distinctive advantage will be that unique talent, skill, characteristic that sets you apart. For some, it might simply be their name.

We Kenyans seem to suffer from chronic copytitis disease. You open a kiosk, your neighbour, his neighbour open the same with the same products and then you all sit chatting as you would normally back at your compounds. You get a new phone, new car etc and etc and the same copying kicks in.

And yet, you'll never achieve the heights until you identify that distinctive advantage and propel yourself forward. For some, this may not be easy owing to the environment, but being the same as others is the not the answer...

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Mpesa is synonymous with "sending money over cell network".. such that someone on Zain will say:

"I shall mpesa you using Zap."

On the flip side: too strong a brand could bring issues for Safcom later. Xerox lost the tradename battle when Xeroxing became synonymous with copying...

Brands must be protected at all costs and usage restrictions must be clear to the public.