Eve Di Potenza

In a world where Amazon is king, how does a smaller Canadian company survive direct competition against it? Amazon has their own shipping. It’s fast, often free, and it’s pretty darn easy to ‘add to cart’ sitting in your pyjamas at home with a glass of wine. The items come with Consumer Reports ratings and an excellent return policy. In a direct comparison, the prices are identical, but Amazon offers cheaper shipping. 

If a customer is only looking for the item, and price is the only deciding factor, Amazon wins. The focus at that point is ‘how to encourage the customer to purchase locally’. Good news, you can appeal to the benevolence of the consumer’s dollar. Instead of feeding the Amazon machine, you waited an extra week for your item, paid a bit more, and helped your local store owners, John and Karen, put their kids through college. You helped, and you feel good about your purchase. People love to support local folks. 

The Calgary Flames haven’t won a Stanley Cup since 1989. But there is a sea of red jerseys to support these guys every game.  They haven’t won a Stanley Cup in most people’s lifetime, but the support and pride for this team is overwhelming. This is a prime example of how you don’t have to be the best to get support. The Flames aren’t the best team, but they’re your team, and they need you. If people think they’re helping you win, literally or figuratively, they will invest in you, and as a marketer, you always need to appeal to that mentality in a direct competition scenario. John and Karen’s local store isn’t the biggest or the best store, but it’s your store, and you are helping them win by buying from them instead of the big guys. Advertising that focuses on John and Karen and shows them working hard with bright, shining faces will drive sales for them and is your strongest edge in a direct-competition marketing campaign. 

My current client has an extensive website you can purchase from that offers the exact same items as Amazon; however, they cannot afford to offer free shipping. What is the one thing I can push as a marketer that Amazon doesn’t have? Their brick-and-mortar locations. In this scenario, the indirect aspect of their competition is their only competition against Amazon. Amazon and my client both offer the exact same thing. Musical instruments you can purchase online. Amazon has beaten independent companies and shut down four different online music stores in Canada in the last two years. 

So yes, my current client sells instruments and all accessories and parts related to instruments. You can get those same parts, accessories and musical instruments from Amazon. If your guitar is not working, you can simply return it to Amazon. You can also return it to my current client as well, but what if it just needs a neck adjustment, the intonation set, and a different gauge of strings? Can an Amazon driver fix your guitar? Can anyone at the warehouse adjust your guitar? What if you love your guitar, but it shows up with a broken string? 

It is the service that differentiates my client from the giant. If you order a new guitar, my client will take it out of the box and check it over for playability prior to sending it to you, and if it still isn’t right when the item arrives at your door, you can go to a brick-and-mortar location, and one of the staff members will adjust your guitar for you. They will show you how to change a string, and they will even show you how to play the instrument. This is indirect competition. Both offer guitars, but only one company will literally tune it up, fix it right there in front of you and hand it to you. 

This indirect competition that my client offers completely destroys Amazon. Instruments are finicky; they require maintenance. I have bought a few kitchen gadgets from Amazon. A toaster, a mixer, and a coffee maker. If and when they break, they often end up in the landfill, and I’ll order a new one. But what about a ten-thousand-dollar tuba? Haha, that is not something a sane person should be buying online. You have to go and try it out, and it will absolutely require yearly maintenance. Amazon and my current company both offer instruments, but only one company offers a way to try the item out, bring it in for servicing and in-store lessons to learn how to use it properly. 

A call to action to bring the client to the locations, the knowledgeable staff, and the ability to try the item you want prior to purchase are what I lean on most when marketing for this client. I take lots of appealing pictures of the items in the location to inspire people to come in to see or play them. I shoot short-form verticals of the sales staff playing with the items, so customers know they are dealing with experts, and I often write short blog posts about maintenance and questions to ask the repair staff. People are still very tactile, and they do crave human interaction. Encouraging human contact in a world that is getting more and more isolated has been my most successful approach in keeping my current company from being eaten alive by Amazon, like so many other small businesses in Canada. 

Either direct or indirect competition can be a challenge for a marketer, but you can find an edge, dig in, and make it work for your client. Direct, where your client offers the exact same services as the competition, or Indirect, where they offer an almost identical product but in a different way. The key is to find what differentiates them from the competition and make that their selling point. Whether it is home-team mentality, superior customer service, a better warranty program, or a clearly defined personal touch, find your advantage and lean on it, market it and help your client succeed with it.