Unique value

There's always that BS how you need to offer unique value to sell, and that's the only way to sell something. I wasn't buying it.
The real deal is that if you want to sell something at a given price you either need unique value, a lot of value or a lot of marketing.
A lot of value is easy to sell. Selling a hundred dollars worth of shit for five bucks is easy.
A lot of marketing is also easy, as it's somebody else's job and usually it's done by throwing a lot of money at it, with a limited amount of brainpower involved.
The problem is that both of these cost a lot.
So unique value is what marketing and sales like, because it's cheap and sells itself.
But unique is rather vague. Just doing something badly in a different way creates uniqueness but not a lot of value. Typically unique value is being the first or the only one doing something valuable to the consumer.
The problem is that it needs a lot of brains, a lot of smart people, a great culture for innovation and individual contribution (almost like a working democracy), a few people with excellent ubderstanding of the market and the customer and a huge pile of pure luck.
Expecting that 'good kind of of unique value' without understanding these factors is a very popular mistake.
Asking why we're not doing a unique new paradigm changing thing AND why we're not doing everything that any of our competitors do, only better - this pisses me off sometime. It's either a choice you have to make or a very tough balancing problem.


-- Posted from my iPhone