Product engineers and service conceptualists believe all differentiation emanates from them. Marketers think they add the secret ingredient through positioning, messaging and tactics. Sales people believe its all in the pitch. In reality, differentiation has its own lifecycle. Avoiding any of the significant phases of that lifecycle can result in a failed product or service. In this article, we’ll provide a brief overview of the lifecycle and the benefits you can experience by embracing it.

Phase One: Needs
God bless the engineers and service development gurus who have the amazing intellectual power to envision products and services before they exist, who see possibilities, who can snag the vision from the ether and bring it into physical existence. The trap, the nasty sink hole that so many fall into, is defining features before defining the need. We build it because we can. In the excitement to make it exist the diligence to determine whether there is indeed a market for the offering is left far behind. Enter assumptions. Enter development delays. Enter greater degrees of risk. Then the product gets dropped in the lap of marketers as does accountability for its success or failure. Sound familiar?

Differentiation begins at the need definition stage. If the need doesn’t exist and forecasts aren’t predicting its generation over the development cycle then differentiation becomes a mute point. It may be the most distinctive offering the world has seen but if no one wants it, you have a problem.

To oversimplify, we have to know before we go. On the marketing side, audience segmentation should be occurring as part of the needs definition process. What needs is this new offering fulfilling for what audience segments? Who are the early adopters, the influencers, and the early majority? Relating the need not only to the general evolution of market trends but also to specific segments within the market is essential.

Phase Two: Responding to Needs
Now we have the fun part. We know there’s a need and know we have to determine how to fill it. In classic creative development it’s the part where the writer writes and the editor edits. Think of the offering development team as the writer and the marketing department as the editor. Why? True creative feature generation should be inspired by the need initially, not limited by competitive context. Differentiation will be applied by pouring the possible features through the sieve of the competitive analysis. Is the need being met by competitors? How? Is it met well? What isn’t being addressed? Are we covering those areas with our feature sets? What is unique about our offering that is going to change the purchase behavior of the competing products with the offering’s current customer base?

Equally important is relating the offering’s features to specific benefits they produce for each audience segment. A feature could be an amazing feat of technical genius but if it doesn’t provide a real benefit, from the audience’s perspective, it loses its worth. Verification of the features and their associated benefits through testing reduces offering development risk and increases the opportunity to succeed in the market.

Once the feature chaff has been separated from the wheat, a second look at the feature set in the context of the benefits and the marketing team’s Gap Analysis should be undertaken. The Gap Analysis highlights those areas underserved by existing offerings that create distinct opportunities for offering differentiation. Empowered by this hand-in-hand process between marketing and the offering development team, the right offering with the right feature set for the right audiences will emerge. That allows marketing and sales to apply their science to help deliver success.

Phase Three: Targets
Differentiation extends to the approach taken to converse with the target. Before that approach can be determined careful profiling of individuals and companies within each audience segment across the offering adoption lifecycle needs to occur. The better you understand the specific psychographic attributes and behaviors of a segment, the more attenuation can occur with the offering in the marketing and sales process to compel individuals within that segment to act. At the same time individual profiling is occurring with the marketing team, company profiling is occurring by the sales team to isolate and understand their prospects.

Phase Four: Platform
The same offering, with the same features, targeted to the same audience segments can be presented as a “me-almost”, a “me-too”, a “better-me” or a “new-me” you haven’t met before. Differentiation is created at the marketing stage beginning with the careful development of the strategic plan identifying how we’re going to reach our customers. The film industry was astonished when Mel Gibson bucked the system and utilized a tight-knit niche market to virally engage his influencer segment to come and see his film about Christ. As we all know, the approach was extremely successful, widening from the original influencer target to the general public, differentiating the movie with the niche market strategy employed.

Hand-in-hand with strategy development is positioning. Drawing on the foundational work of the previous segments, determining the positioning that will best resonate with customer segments is a key component of achieving differentiation. If your competitor is using a features-based positioning is it brand consistent to utilize aspirational positioning? If so, you’ve added to the offering’s differentiation through the identification of and subsequent ownership of that positioning gap.

Further differentiation is achieved with messaging creation. How offering benefits are encapsulated and emotional resonance is crafted determines a high degree of differentiation within the market. Unfortunately the messaging stage is often relegated to a recanting of the offerings’ features, returning it to the sea of sameness it was trying to rise above. The creative process is short-circuited to deliver tactics more quickly with thinking that timing, as opposed to differentiation, will be the bigger market mover. There are a plethora of mp3 players, there’s only one ipod. Messaging and the creative design to carry that messaging to targets provides the market differentiation so many seek and so few are willing to engage in the process to get.

Phase Five: Delivery Tactics
The method of delivery can provide immediate differentiation in a target’s mind by the very nature of the delivery mechanisms. Receiving a text message creates a differentiated impression from receiving a direct mail postcard. Designing the delivery methods and mechanisms to provide brand consistent differentiation builds on the distinctiveness of all of the previous phases. Tying the delivery mechanism specifically to each audience segment and the emotion(s) you wish to connect with in each audience will help deliver the differentiation in the audience’s mind which will help drive brand engagement.

Phase Six: Aftercare
Post-purchase company behavior holds tremendous potential for comprehensive differentiation from competitors. There are many examples from customer service, to loyalty programs to end of life product acceptance for recycling and responsible disposition of non-recyclable elements. Aftercare involves all three disciplines. The Offerings Development team plans for end-of-life products. Marketing implements loyalty programs and the sales team provides support mechanisms appropriate to the product. These are just a few of the post-purchase categories where a company can successfully differentiate itself with its audiences.

Summary
This overview of the Differentiation Lifecycle has taken a brief look at a very complex subject. To master the lifecycle and employ it effectively requires cross-disciplinary cooperation as well as a commitment to the process. Relying on one group or one stage in the lifecycle to achieve market-changing revenue-boosting differentiation is the recipe for offering development teams being reassigned, marketers being dismissed, sales people called on the carpet and genuine shareholder malaise. Respect the lifecycle, the teams, and the process and reduce your go to market risk while increasing your opportunity for success.