Standing Out from the Competition
March 22, 2009 by Jean Murray
Filed under Business
Why does every hotel offer free breakfast and free wireless Internet? Because everyone expects it. The key to making your small business stand out from others is giving people what they want - plus the unexpected.
My husband and I are traveling and this morning we went down for our free 
breakfast. My husband complained about the “microwave eggs.” This wasn’t just your “couple of bagels” breakfast. They had an assortment of bagels, muffins, and pastries, plus several cereals, and a hot breakfast of eggs, sausage, and biscuits. Everything was free. But it was expected.
Same thing with Internet. When even the smallest out-of-the way diner has free wireless Internet, you aren’t going to differentiate yourself from the competition unless you do something different. Something unexpected.
Making yourself different from the competition is about managing expectations. That is, you have to give customers what they expect, plus some things they don’t. When hotels and motels began offering free breakfasts, it was unusual. A sign with “free breakfast” would bring people to your hotel instead of the hotel right next to it. Now almost every hotel has free breakfast.
How do you stand out? Find something others are not doing and do it. I always say McDonald’s created the “eating out” breakfast. Before they came along and offered the Egg McMuffin, we didn’t know we could eat breakfast at a fast food place.
Being first is difficult. You have to be creative, think out of the box, find something that makes people say, “WOW! I never thought of that.”
Here are somt ideas to help you jump-start your creativity:
What can you add? What new services can you add? What product extras can you put with your product?
What can you take away? What barriers to buying can you remove? What complexity or difficulty can you take away?
What fun can you put in? How can you make the buying experience fun?
What value can you insert? Can you give people something unexpected that adds value to buying your products or services?
Breakfast, anyone?
image: sxc.hu
Free is very well and good -perhaps even expected – but, as your husband pointed out, is it food you’d actually want to eat?
To use your example, a small hotel might do just as well to offer something smaller but of tremendous quality. (E.g. Fine espresso made with love, rather than nasty drip coffee. In jumping so far ahead of the quality queue, no guest would miss rubbery eggs).
To me – that would stand out.