How do you make your product stand out when it’s not unique? Say you have a coffee cart. It’s in a good location, and gets lots of traffic, but you’re no different from any of the thousands of other coffee carts in your area. What do you do?

The answer is to make the stand (and the experience) remarkable – build a tribe.  The key is to differentiate it from all the other stands and all the other coffee places in the area and make it a fun and special place to go and tell  your friends about.

Offer something worth talking about

1) Offer free Wifi – draw customers in, make your stand a place to hang out, stay, and order more coffee.

2) Hold a contest for customers to invent a new blend of coffee.  The winner gets a cash prize or say 10 pounds of the winning entry.

3) Have customers submit quotes (either their own or from famous people) about coffee, or just inspirational, to be printed on the cups.  Have a new quote each week or each month.  Have customers vote on the best ones.  Winners have their quote printed, along with their names.

Build a story around your company

This works for anything, t-shirts, music, dolls, Lego…make the product experience special:  be the company that gives away free t-shirts with every order, or the one with no time limits or scripts for customer service reps.  And, you don’t need a big budget to do it. What can you do with a $500 budget to make your product worth talking about?

(i) by Bonnie Larner