Guerrilla Marketing Part 3

A few years ago I attended a business class at the local Adult Education campus and one of the guest speakers asked us a very provocative question. “How do you beat the competition?” The class offered, “Lower prices.” “Faster delivery.” “Better quality.” “Greater selection.” and “Friendlier service.” The lecturer then said, “Yes, those are all good answers but not the one I am looking for. The way to beat the competition is to change the rules - and then don’t tell them what the new rules are.”

At first this could sound like a superficial answer but it’s not. I have used that idea ever since in the guerrilla marketing that we do. Here’s one way.

Periodically we do an anonymous survey of our competition. (And we assume that they do the same thing to us.) We send out a request for quote and then compare their response to what ours would be for the same work. Of course we compare their prices with ours. We also compare several other things. We want to know how their promised delivery compares to ours. We compare how their response to a request for a quote compares to ours. And there is one other aspect we compare that I’ll talk about later.

The last time we conducted a survey, this is what we found. Some prices were lower than ours. That’s fine with us because we do not want to have the lowest prices in town. (That’s the worst way to compete.) Most of the delivery quotes - how soon a customer gets the finished product after he places the order - were about equal to ours.

Then we got to response time - how soon they got back to us with a quote. The fastest response was about ten days after we sent our request. Our policy is one that reflects the idea of changing the rules and not telling them what the new rules are. We respond to 90% of all requests within four hours; 100% within 24 hours. Why is this important? It’s a human trait. When we want something - whether it’s a new car or a new house or even a haircut - we want it now, not two weeks from now. With our four hour response time we frequently have quoted the customer, got the order, produced and shipped the product before our competition has even responded with a quote. Talk about changing the rules!

Now one of the last things that we compare between our competition and ourselves. When we send out the request for quote, we include a small mistake of some kind - a misspelled word, a broken line, something. When the competition responds, we look to see if they bring that to our attention. The competition never does; we always do. We are sure our customers appreciate that.

Change the rules and don’t tell them what the new rules are.