Make Your Own Kind of Marketing

I don’t know how I got to travel through several cities in Switzerland without actually seeing a live Alphorn performance.  I had to experience this at the Cleveland German Festival over Labor Day weekend.

This is a picture of the young woman who started out playing the french horn and about 5 years ago, she discovered the Alphorn and has become an avid Alphorn performer since then.

Now that’s what I call a new life cycle!

As I sat there I thought about how her taking up the unique Alphorn after the more common French Horn was a great example of re-positioning and starting a new life cycle.  Here are a few of the lessons I saw at work during her presentation:

• Good Repositioning doesn’t require major changes. Successful re-positioning moves you from being a small fish in a big pond, to being a big fish in a small pond.  Please note – you’re still a fish and you’re still in a pond.  How can you take what you already do well and find an application in a new market or industry.
• You don’t have to be THAT different to differentiate. The Alphorn player traded one horn for another and suddenly create a wealth of new performance opportunities.  The key to differentiating yourself from the competition is to stay within a core strength and apply it to something new and different.

Finding your own uniqueness comes from exploring the things that make your organization strong and which seek ways to express themselves in more ways, in more cirmcumstances than you are currently exploring.