With hundreds of new products going to market every day, there’s a lot more competition out there. Product features are more easily replicable, growth strategies are becoming commoditized and every company is a media company now.
The playbooks are exactly the same so if you’re not focused on doing things differently, you’re creating an opportunity for your competitors to catch up. In years past, you could maintain your competitive advantage by hiring more and building newer features. Your product still needs to be good but, in today’s tightened market, it’s all about doing more with less, building your community and brand.
The brand is your differentiator
With so many products emerging and so many companies running the same playbook, it’s hard for any one of them to stand out. Couple that with the fact that software isn’t exactly sexy and it’s easy to default to a boring brand and boring advertising. Enter the new campaign from Air called “A Behavioral Study of the Creative Process.”
Air provides DAM (digital asset management) software. They should be talking about CDNs and storage limits, not (spoiler alert) suffocating Creative Directors.
It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but you can’t argue that it’s not different. The video has a point of view and personality, not a giant feature dump. It feels like something unique to the DAM industry because guess what their competitors are doing? They’re talking about CDNs and storage limits.
Talking about your product isn’t a bad thing. There are plenty of ways to have a unique POV without anyone “dying” too.
A great example of a brand doing b-to-b differently is Jasper AI. As government agencies try to figure out how to regulate artificial intelligence, Jasper addressed some of those questions head-on in “Meet Jasper, your AI assistant.” In between product highlights, we can see and hear mentions of anti-plagiarism, originality and AI as a tool to help, rather than take, your job.
Or you can just go the Ryan Reynolds route like Nuvei. In “Aboot Nuvei,” we see a company starting to take on the personality of its investors (or in this case just one of its investors). It’s funny, it’s charming, it doesn’t take itself too seriously and it’s aligned with one of the most successful brands on the planet: Ryan Reynolds. Not everyone can pull this one off but it’s a great example of not taking yourself too seriously in an industry like fintech, which is traditionally pretty stuffy and regulated.
