photo credit: Chris Owens
“Write positive content! Don’t get into the negativity game! Don’t badmouth your competitors!” runs the conventional wisdom. In general, it’s okay advice. Certainly you don’t want to get a reputation for being a sarcastic jerk-off that sneers at everyone. (Unless that’s your position in the market. It’s not my style but some people like it.)
But you see things your competitors do that you’re appalled by. You know, since you are awesome, that you would never, ever do the shoddy, dodgy, inethical, cruel, lazy, high-handed, barbaric, stupid, money-grabbing and near-sighted crap that they do. And there is nothing wrong with letting the world know that you’re taking a stand against all those practices. There’s just one thing you have to do to make it work:
Never, ever give a hint about who you’re referring to when you criticise practices in your industry.
Let’s face it, it’ll be easy to avoid naming names… so many of the bad practices you’re enraged by are almost standard operation. They’re The Way Things Are Done, Mate, And If You Don’t Like It You Can Always Leave. In fact, the more widespread it is, the easier to take a stand.
Let’s get critical
First start by describing the horrible stuff your competitors do. Let me give you an example to get started on.
Here’s a thing that really ticks me off: so many small businesses end up with a website that doesn’t work and costs far far too much money. I’ve seen website designers who never think about what the business needs; they only think about the technology they can provide. So instead of helping the business develop an online strategy, target their clients and start planning the content, they build a box and call it done. Worse, they often build a “custom CMS” or a uniquely coded HTML website that requires the business to come back to the designer every time they want to change any content. So they don’t change the content, and the website is useless.
Now that was a moderately scathing condemnation of the business practices of many web designers. But I didn’t name any of them, or identify them uniquely. Even if some of the ones I was specifically thinking about read that rant, they won’t know I’m talking about them.
Better than you
This really gets powerful when you take those points and use them to start talking about what you do differently. If I ever decided to build websites professionally (and I won’t, because I enjoy teaching much more than code-wrangling) my services page would say this:
I won’t talk with you about the technology; that’s my job. What you and I will discuss is who your website is for and what you want it to say. I’ll help you design a strategy that will improve your relationship with your current and future customers, sell your products or services, and still let you sleep at night. Once we know what you need, then I’ll do the technical stuff to build you a website. It’ll be entirely under your control, and simple to use so you don’t need to keep paying someone to keep it current.
I’ve taken a bunch of my strongest criticisms of web designers and made it all about the customer, and how I’m defining my relationship with them. The competitors aren’t mentioned at all, but I’m still criticising the heck out of them.
The more well-known the faults of your industry are (plumbers are never on time, techies sneer at laypeople) the more effective it is for you to describe the way you’ll do business as a positive (we’ll always be on time, we will always explain in jargon-free language) instead of a negative (we won’t be late, we won’t use jargon).
Of course, this brings us back to the start… after starting by challenging it, I’m now agreeing with the conventional wisdom (“Write positive content! Don’t get into the negativity game! Don’t badmouth your competitors!”). Well, to a point. Defining yourself entirely by your competitors is a bad idea. Writing all your content about what you won’t do is a bad idea. But you can still obey those guidelines and rip a new one off your competitors, too.
Your 5-minute mission, should you choose to accept it…
Write a declaration of how your business operates that is better than your competitors, without mentioning them in any way.
Can you name three ways you’re better than your competitors? Tell us in the comments!