The Martin Messier Gazette

Constantly seeking feedback from your customers is a great way to learn how to market your business more effectively. If you’ve never done this before, do it immediately as it is one of the best ways to discover what you do that actually differentiates you from your competition.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked with a small business that had no idea what its competitive advantage was until we heard it right from the mouths of happy customers. [...]

In this post, Michel Fortin highlights a few distinctions you must keep in mind when positioning your offering.
Simply stated, you may offer something that everyone else does. But you could also offer something more, above and along with your product, than no one else does.
Let me explain. Your product is composed of three distinct levels:

There’s the core product (the product’s main benefit),
The actual product (the product itself and its features),
And the augmented product (the product’s value, such as the added value — additional [...]

Here’s Jason Fried’s awesome first-person interview from Big Think.

Share and Enjoy:

Great question and great metaphor that Cath Duncan has written extensively about on Productive Flourishing.
About Tour Guides
Tour Guides take people to places they know well, places that have already been mapped out by many pioneers and experts. The best Tour Guides know the territory well because they’ve personally been there before and navigated the territory themselves, getting the opportunity to learn first-hand what works, what the highlights are and what’s worth focusing on. Great Tour Guides have taken time to [...]

Matt Linderman of 37Signals wrote a nice post a few days ago about the importance of making your product easy to work with.
He came upon the topic after listening to the debate between critics and entusiasts of the awaited iPad.
He closed his post nicely with:
You can crank up the snow machine. You can set up the slalom course perfectly. You can shape all the moguls so they’re just right. But if people can’t ever get on the ski lift, there [...]