Weigh your options
Knowing he needed to change the company, McLaughlin took a step back to think about and evaluate the business.
“It’s difficult, but you have to try to be objective and sort of put on the mindset of a customer as you consider the different opportunities to differentiate,” he says. “All of us inside a company can get too much into our own thinking and what we think is cool, but, ultimately, if the differentiation isn’t one that customers would agree is truly different and matters, then why work on that?”
But you can’t be different just for the sake of being different either.
“The second thing is to look for a point of differentiation that you believe is sustainable because all good competitors will copy all good ideas if you can,” he says. “If you can’t find a point of sustainable differentiation, then get out of that business.”
Using this as guidance, he explored three concepts — selection, location and customer service. But because of the way Branders was set up as an online business, he knew none of these would work, and that left him with one alternative — price.
“The only thing I thought I could do a lot with was price,” he says. “It looked like it would work, and I didn’t have any better ideas.”
One of his good friends, who was 80 years old and a very bright marketing mind gave him some advice, as well.
“He said, ‘People always think there’s going to be three or four things, and you have to go figure this out, and in my experience, you’re lucky if you can find one — one way out of the darkness that is going to work for you, and if you can find it, be glad and go do that thing,’” McLaughlin says.
