Avoiding Commoditization

If your customers are starting to treat your product or service as a commodity, you have two choices:

1. First, act as the victim and blame the market.
2. Second, take responsibility and try to turn things around.

You guessed it, and you know me, how about #2?

Firstly, no product is a complete commodity.

Even electricity can be different. For example, if you are selling power, are you producing it with fuel? Coal? Wind? Solar? I bet your buyers care about the method. Or if they don’t, maybe they should.

You can evolve the modus operandi–the narrative–people use to decide what kind of electricity they want to buy. You can always shift the way they think.

But first, you will need to shift the way you think:

• The narrative is not just about your buyers, and it’s not solely about your company either.
• The narrative is about the opportunity that you could achieve as a community, together, with your buyers.

Say you manage to change the general perception about electricity and how we make it, measure it, or maybe store it. What kind of opportunity does this create for everyone? I bet it’s bigger than your company alone.

That’s what a new strategic narrative does:

• It’s not to brag more about why your electricity is better.
• Instead, it’s to shift the way people think about electricity in general.
• A new narrative is a new discourse, a new interpretation of the stories we’ve all heard, one that moves the debate forward.
• It is a new set of convictions and a new perspective that makes a difference in people’s minds.

That’s how you can avoid commoditization: not just because your product is different, but because you seek to make a difference in people’s life.