How do you determine the method you will use to promote your business brand? If you are like a lot of businesses, your marketing decisions are influenced by what is popular now. You are seeing your competition market themselves in a certain way and being successful. You follow their lead. In every market, there are trendsetters and there are followers – mere copycats of what others are doing. If you want to own your market, you have to be the one leading the way, not the one who is playing follow the leader.

Just how do you take the lead in your particular market? You might be thinking that it involves risk. Every new endeavor in business is somewhat risky. So does marketing leadership involve tossing caution to the wind and trying any new idea that crosses the synapses of your brain? No. It involves being able to think beyond the confines of what has already been done or tried, but it also involves some careful (and time consuming) planning around what you want the market to believe about you and how you will communicate that to them. Let me take you on a journey to be the leader.

What does the leader offer that the competition does not?

What would it look like for your company to be the leader in your market? For one, innovation and creativity. You can be seen as the leader if you are positioned as the company on the edge of everything new. The first to introduce a product or service to the marketplace is typically seen as the leader. Think of Apple Computers and the many products we now use that they introduced, such as the personal computers that revolutionized the way technology operates in all areas of our lives, the iPad tablet computer and the iPhone Smartphone. However, you may know that many of the products Apple is thought to have invented were not the first of their kind to hit the market, including the three I just listed. Apple did not introduce the personal computer to the marketplace, that was the MITS Altair 8800. Nor were they the first to manufacture a tablet computer (Microsoft had ten years earlier) and they did not invent the first SmartPhone (IBM’s Simon was launched in 1992). So why do we all think that Apple has introduced all this cutting-edge technology into the marketplace when they actually refined what others have already created? It comes down to the way they have positioned themselves through marketing.

If you want to be seen as the leader in your market, you must have a marketing strategy that recognizes three factors: customer demands, current influential trends and what your competition is doing to promote their brand.

What does the customer want?

Notice that I did not ask what the customer needs. There is a difference between a solution to a need – something that is key to the way your customer lives – and a solution to a want – something beyond the need that has a few more bells and whistles. Selling to a customer’s wants has more emotion attached to it. A fully loaded automobile (want) is much more appealing than a stripped down model (need.) Market leaders are very in tune with their customer base. They understand the appeal something new has on them, so they are always looking to upgrade what they have and repackage it to sell it again. In many cases, a customer may not know what they want because they have not been exposed to it yet. That’s where the next step comes in.

What are the influential trends?

Is bigger better or is smaller better? It depends upon when you ask because bigger and smaller are opposite extremes of trends. Attitudes in your marketplace are shaped by these trends. Who sets trends? Key influencers. If you market to these influencers, you can catch the trends around their influence. That is why Apple Computers holds its Worldwide Developers Conference every year to showcase its new product offerings. It is also why many of the consumer products other companies tried to take to market failed while Apple has been overwhelmingly successful.

Influential trendsetters are also cross pollinators. What is happening in what seems to be a totally unrelated field can end up as the new trend for you. For instance, one of the innovative features on the original iPhones was their ability to take a photo. Now why would a phone need to be able to take a photo? Because social media was full of photos - that was the trend. By making it easy for someone to take a photo with their phone and post it immediately to social media, Apple caught the trend and made their product an integral part of the wave.

What is the competition doing?

If you want to own your marketplace, you have to differentiate yourself from your competition. What is unique about your business brand? Emphasize the difference in your marketing. But also don’t lose sight of what your competition is doing. Can you reshape what they are doing and do it better? If so, make this a part of your marketing campaign. Apple didn’t invent the computer, they just made it much more user friendly so you didn’t have to be a coder to operate it. You can own your market if you hammer away at the differences between you and your competition. You don’t need a large list of differences. In fact, the fewer distinctions are typically better because they are more memorable. You may remember the PC vs Mac commercials years ago that personified the PC as a total nerd and the Mac as hip and trendy. (Click here to see 15 episodes of the commercials). That was before being a nerd became trendy, so Apple changed their advertising message.

If you want to own your market, you have to be seen as the leader. Take a look at the wants of your customers, the influential trends and your competition’s attempt to promote themselves. Build your marketing around a strategy that promotes your customers’ wants, catches the trends and distances you from the competition.

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The world's first smartphone, Simon, was created 15 years before the iPhone, by Steven Tweedie, Business Insider, June 14, 2015

Microsoft Invented A Tablet A Decade Before Apple And Totally Blew It, by Julie Bort, Business Insider, May 30, 2013

Personal Computer History: 1975-1984, by Daniel Knight, Lowendmac.com April 26, 2014