Zoom didn't beat video conferencing
Most businesses think they know exactly who they're competing with.
"We're up against X agency." "Our main competition is Y."
A lot of the time though, the competition has nothing to do with another supplier. The buyer delays, solves it another way, or does nothing at all.
This is because buyers don't shop in categories. They shop in problems.
There's a theory called Jobs to Be Done that explains this well.
People don't buy products or services. They hire them to get a specific job done. And that job exists in the buyer's mind long before they've thought about a category.
The article uses Zoom as a good example. Before 2020, Zoom wasn't really competing with other video conferencing tools. It was competing with business travel, the assumption that meetings had to happen in person, and the belief that remote work was second-best.
The job people hired Zoom for was keeping businesses running when everyone was in different places.
The same logic applies to how you position your own business. Call yourself a digital agency and you get compared on channels and price. Call yourself a growth partner and the conversation moves to commercial outcomes.
The category you put yourself in shapes who compares you, what they compare you on, and whether price becomes the whole battleground.
Strategy doesn't start with messaging. It starts with choosing the field.
So before you refine your positioning or increase your budget, it’s worth asking: what are your customers actually hiring you to do?
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This is taken from the weekly email written by one of our directors, Roberto Boi. Every Thursday he shares observations, ideas and perspectives from the work we’re doing day to day at Dilate. If you’d like to get it delivered straight to your inbox, you can sign up here.
