I'll Have the $3.95!

I was reading Seth Godin's blog again tonight. It reminded me of what one of my other business teachers, Professor Keith Hafner, once told me. He said that he could teach Karate for only $35/month. The thing is, you get a different quality of student. A $35/month student doesn't have the same dedication as a $75/month student, and he, in turn, is of a different quality than the student who pays $150/month. Of course, you still need to provide the $150/month value, but personally, I'd rather be that great company that goes the extra mile rather than the one that was cheap, er, I mean "inexpensive".

Still, there is that temptation. Value competition is difficult. It requires imagination and creativity. The owners of the Pump (the restaurant in Seth's post) could have opened a McDonalds. It probably would have been a lot easier. Of course, they would have been competing with every other low-priced lunch stand in town. Instead, not only did they come up with a creative solution, they also allowed their customers to get into the creative fun. After all, it would take a while to exhaust 41,000,000 combinations!

So, this leads me to my own navel-gazing contemplations of how I can provide my own customers with "41,000,000 combinations". Obviously, my business of "rescuing people from their own websites" is a bit different from a multi-option sandwich shop or a Karate school. The basic concept applies. If I don't follow the path of value competition, then I become just another website maintenance company, scrambling to undercut my competition in order to get the clients who will walk away from me as soon as someone else decides to undercut me.

OK, I'm not sure, but that price competition stuff sounds like a lot of work, too. Maybe I'll try that creativity route. It, at least, sounds like it might be fun.

I'll try to get back to my usual stories tomorrow. I'm going to try to get a good picture of our massive jack o'lantern display (OK, so it's only 13 pumpkins, it will still look big on our tiny front porch!).

So, how do you make yourself or your business unique and valuable?