Two steps to improve your product competitiveness and avoid homogenization

Below we will analyze from two perspectives: differentiation and low cost .

The first step to improve product competitiveness: differentiation

Why differentiation?

Scarcity makes things valuable, and clothes are better when they are new. We have been taught this concept since childhood. Scarcity and uniqueness often imply preciousness, while similarity means ordinariness (even if this is not necessarily the case, people will always subconsciously form such a judgment). So we tend to pursue things that are unique and scarce, such as gold, jewelry, and luxury goods. Uniqueness and scarcity can help us quickly establish social status, distinguish ourselves from "ordinary people", and make us look more unique and valuable. In primitive society, it is even related to our lifelong happiness - choosing a mate.

Uniqueness has a deep-rooted influence on people's choices and decisions, and if you want to be unique, you must create differences.

How to differentiate?

We need to think in two dimensions, depth and breadth .

We all know that Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory divides human needs into five levels, but when we plan and design products, we also divide needs into core needs, potential needs and surface needs according to the user's needs level.

Core needs are the ultimate goals that users want to achieve by using your products, services or functions. Potential needs are additional needs that users generate in the process of achieving this goal. Meeting these additional needs can often help users better achieve this goal. Surface needs are often solutions to achieving core needs.

For example, for a workplace skills training product, what are the core needs of users? Find a better job. The superficial needs expressed by users are to take courses and participate in training. The courses and training here are the solutions we provide to meet the core needs of our users. It should be noted that once potential needs are discovered, they become surface needs. Core needs are ultimate needs, the needs with the highest frequency of demand, and are always hidden behind surface needs and need to be distinguished.

Of course, the needs of each user are not necessarily the same. For user A, perhaps learning knowledge for the purpose of showing off is the core need; while for user B, employment is the core need. When we are not sure, we can determine which demand is more frequently requested and which demand is the core demand through user surveys, data analysis , and research on user background, culture, and industry market.

Of course, for the vast majority of users of training products, finding a better job is their core need, and showing off in front of friends is only their potential need.

During the three classes of Internet knowledge training, I once held an activity on the WeChat official account where users could enter their names to generate a business card and pretend to be employed by Facebook . This activity took advantage of the potential needs of users and attracted a lot of attention at the time.

1. Differentiate in depth

It is necessary to find the user's core needs behind the superficial needs, and then provide a series of solutions to help users achieve this goal. Optimizing solutions is the main task of achieving in-depth differentiation.

Optimizing solutions means helping users meet their needs better and faster.

（1）Helping users better realize their needs

This is actually very easy to understand. If you are a public account that shares Internet knowledge, then are the articles you push valuable? Are they useful and can users gain something from them? If you are in the service industry, are the services you provide of high value to users and are they very helpful? These are the metrics.

(2) Help users realize their needs faster

For the vast majority of content-based products, helping users meet their needs faster requires reducing users’ cognitive costs.

Now many WeChat public accounts have launched audio articles. Users no longer need to spend time and energy reading text content. They can directly click on the audio to listen to the article content. This helps users meet their needs faster.

Why is it faster? It's not just because listening to an article takes less time than reading it, but also because vision is secondary cognition and hearing is primary cognition. The higher the level, the more complex the understanding process becomes.

The advantage of speech over text is that after the auditory information enters the brain, the brain does not need to decode and reprocess it with effort, while visual information does. Therefore, we often feel that listening to books is not effortful, and we even have the leisure to do other things, but this is not the case with reading books. And when we read, we often convert the text information into sound in our minds first, so there is always a voice in our mind, reading synchronously when you read. This is especially true for more complex visual information, such as obscure text. (PS: If you want to learn something seriously, you should just read it carefully. If you want to deepen your understanding, you need to practice repeatedly and deliberately. The complex understanding process can deepen your understanding.)

There are also many contents involving highly professional products, such as medical beauty public accounts, whose users are mostly women who seek beauty. If the pushed content is too professional and professional terms appear frequently, the results will definitely be unpleasant. Therefore, the content of the article needs to be reprocessed, using simple stories to tell complex truths. This is the case with public accounts in the medical beauty industry such as SoYoung and GengMei, which turn professional content into entertainment.

At the beginning of 2016, a major event occurred in the Chinese stock market - the circuit breaker, which attracted extensive media coverage. As we all know, the stock market is a highly professional field. Seeing all kinds of analysis reports flooding the screen, many people were confused until someone used cartoons to vividly demonstrate the principle of circuit breakers. Then the people suddenly understood. As a result, this article received over 100,000+ views.

Similarly, many articles that contain useful information have very dry content, but their dissemination volume is not high, which is also due to this problem. Try to reduce the frequency of professional vocabulary, use more cases and stories, and use clear structures and mind maps to help users understand, so as to reduce cognitive costs and make your content popular.

For most products that focus on functional services, helping users realize their needs faster requires reducing users’ operating costs and optimizing their experience paths.

For products such as consulting services, we need to continuously optimize the process of “users find consultants - initiate consultations - get feedback”. Categorize consultants so that users can find suitable consultants more quickly; establish a rating, comment and label system for consultants to help users make decisions and choose consultants quickly; optimize the operational process for users to initiate consultations, etc.

2. Differentiate in breadth

Continuously explore users' potential needs and combine these potential needs with existing core needs to bring added value to users (users often have more than one potential need. For example, user B may also have the potential need to communicate with peers in the same industry and establish social relationships);

Logical thinking not only shares knowledge, recommends good books, but also builds a community . Learning ways of thinking and knowledge is the core need of users, while buying books and establishing social relationships with common enthusiasts for communication and sharing are potential needs of users. The combination of knowledge sharing + good book recommendations + establishing a social circle of like-minded people constitutes the user value chain of Logical Thinking.

We published an article last year titled "Operators, why is your public account unpopular? 》 I mentioned that public accounts need to be personalized. Now let’s analyze it from this perspective: users establish social relationships with the personality images we create, and generate emotional connections and resonances. This is the added value we bring to them while meeting their core needs.

When new users follow you, in addition to core needs, they actually have the potential need to make friends with opinion leaders. After all, following is the first step to socializing.

Demand combination to build user value chain. There is one point that requires special attention, which is also a misunderstanding that many products easily fall into.

That is, avoid combining demands that are not in the same demand chain.

What does it mean? That is, if your product is to teach people how to cook, then there is no problem in recommending and selling kitchen utensils in your product. Buying good kitchen utensils is itself a potential demand of users. Whether buying kitchen utensils or learning cooking skills is to meet the core needs of users - to cook better and make better dishes. They are on the same demand chain.

But if you sell other household items in this product, it won’t work. Users will not buy from you. They will go to Taobao, JD.com, or the supermarket to buy it. If you insist on selling these, the conversion rate will not be high. This is the case with many public accounts. While pushing content, they also sell products that have little relevance to the content positioning. Not only will the conversion rate not be improved, but it will also affect users' perception of your public account.

Let me emphasize again that an effective combination of needs should be: one core need + multiple potential needs, and these potential needs ultimately help users meet the core needs . If not, please combine them with caution.

Another misunderstanding is to combine multiple core needs. Many products have done this in the past, such as 58.com and Ganji.com. Even if the same user group does have various needs, listing all the core needs together will cause cognitive barriers for users. Nowadays, product functions are highly homogenized, and users will only remember the best few in a certain field. This is why vertical market segments are becoming increasingly larger. I remember the slogan of 58.com: "58.com, a magical website!" I can feel the embarrassment even through the screen.

Apart from this sentence, I really can't think of any other sentence to describe it. Even so, for potential users who have never used 58.com, what does 58.com do? Still don’t know. If 58.com continues to adopt this communication method, its market share will eventually be taken away by more and more vertically segmented products. (Due to space limitations, we will focus on positioning in communication theory in a later article)

The second step to improve product competitiveness: low cost

That is, to formulate operation processes and standards, optimize operation processes, and reduce operation costs. The content output, user management, activity operation, etc. during the operation process are streamlined and standardized.

For example, when we operate and plan activities, we can streamline the activities and turn them into a series of activities held every other cycle. For operators, streamlining and standardizing activities can not only greatly reduce operating costs, but also facilitate user recognition and memory, forming a brand effect. Tmall 's Double Eleven and JD's 618 are both of this type.

The same is true for content operations . Finding the common structure of articles and producing content according to the common format can greatly reduce production time. For example, we can find that the structure of articles about useful information is basically similar:

Ask a question - give an answer - explain the answer (theory + opinion) - solution

Once you have the skeleton and a suitable topic, you can raise questions, look for theories and cases to support your views, and provide solutions, and the flesh and blood of the article will emerge.

Similarly, the formulation of membership systems, user management rules, and other standards and processes are also considered from this perspective.

Conclusion

Continuously differentiate your product content and services, while at the same time optimizing operational processes, reducing operating costs, forming competitive barriers, and preventing competitors from keeping up with your iteration speed.

The above are the two optimization directions we have proposed on how to improve product competitiveness from the perspective of product planning and design.

There is also a lot to be said about this topic from the perspective of communication, but due to limited space, we will focus on it in later articles.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

The author of this article @谢金钟 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!