If you're successful, people will try to copy what you do. It's just a fact of life.
But there's a great way to protect yourself from copycats: Make you part of your
product or service. Inject what's unique about the way you think into what you
sell. Decommoditize your product. Make it something no one else can offer.
Look at Zappos.com, a billion-dollar online shoe retailer. A pair of sneakers
from Zappos is the same as a pair from Foot Locker or any other retailer. But
Zappos sets itself apart by injecting CEO Tony Hsieh's obsession with customer
service into everything it does.
At Zappos, customer-service employees don't use scripts and are allowed to
talk at length with customers. The call center and the company's headquarters are
in the same place, not oceans apart. And all Zappos employees--even those who
don't work in customer service or fulfillment--start out by spending four weeks
answering phones and working in the warehouse. It's this devotion to customer
service that makes Zappos unique among shoe sellers.
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Another example is Polyface, an environmentally friendly Virginia farm
owned by Joel Salatin. Salatin has a strong set of beliefs and runs his business
accordingly. Polyface sells the idea that it does things a bigger agribusiness can't
do. Even though it's more expensive to do so, it feeds cows grass instead of corn
and never gives them antibiotics. It never ships food. Anyone is welcome to visit
the farm anytime and go anywhere (try that at a typical meat-processing plant).
Polyface doesn't just sell chickens, it sells a way of thinking. And customers love
Polyface for it. Some customers routinely drive from 150 miles away to get
"clean" meat for their families.
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Pour yourself into your product and everything around your product too: how
you sell it, how you support it, how you explain it, and how you deliver it.
Competitors can never copy the you in your product.