When embarking on any professional relationship, it’s usually easiest to form partnerships with the biggest company or the one that been around the longest. Many times we assume a partnership will be successful simply because of the perceived success of an organization. However, it’s equally as important not to discount the value of the outlier.
As a result of conventional thinking, outliers can be overlooked which creates an environment where most companies end up looking like their competitors. As one Fortune 500 CFO once said, “Our strategy is a good one. We know it because everyone else [in our industry] has the same strategy.” It’s exactly this thinking that keeps outlier companies on the fringes.
The outliers are the ones who innovate, the ones who instigate change, and the ones who push an industry forward. Apple, Amazon, Zappos, and Google come to mind when thinking about industry outliers that have capitalized on being different. They stand out because they don’t think like their competition and the same applies to the promotional products industry.
While there are many companies simply looking to compete against each other with similar products and value propositions, there are organizations that seek to distance themselves from that clamorous crowd. DistributorCentral has been an outlier in the promotional products industry for some time simply because they are built differently:
- Free, open, and accessible platform
- Lean organization that is nimble to the requests of users
- Complete data integration with leading software partners
Outliers understand that if they don’t experiment, they will become the experiment. Sometimes the experiments succeed and sometimes they fail. The important thing that outliers embrace is the need to continue to try something new. Outliers are the ones who dream up solutions for problems we not only face today, but will face tomorrow.
If you do things the way they’ve always been done, you’ll get what you’ve always got. By doing things that their mainstream competitors do not, they innovate the way business is done and stand out from a very noisy crowd.
brandivatemarketing
@brandivatemktg
About brandivate
Bill has over 15 years working in executive leadership positions at leading promotional products distributorships. In 2014, he launched brandivate – the first executive outsourcing company solely focused on helping small and medium sized promotional products enterprises responsibly grow their business.
A featured speaker at numerous industry events, a serial creator of content marketing, Vice President for the Promotional Products Association of the Mid-South (PPAMS), and PromoKitchen chef, Bill has extensive experience coaching sales teams, creating successful marketing campaigns, developing operational policies and procedures, creating and developing winning RFP responses, and presenting winning promotional products solutions to Fortune 500 clients.
