How to differentiate your product with a compelling story.

As you may know, I have a bit of a thing for coffee.

I have way too much coffee making equipment, and have tried dozens of different coffees from all over the world.

And… given what I do for a living… I have become something of a student of the coffee business.

When it comes to marketing, coffee presents us with a few challenges.

First off, coffee is essentially a commodity. Literally, it is second only to oil in terms of its value as a traded commodity.

But from a marketer’s and a copywriter’s point of view, coffee is a commodity because… well… it’s just a green bean that is roasted until it’s brown.

It’s a brown bean.

Whether you’re Starbucks or a just-started coffee roaster, you’re playing the same game and selling the same thing… that small brown bean.

Fortunately, coffees from different parts of the world have slightly different tastes. So there are some flavor differences we can work with.

And the roaster can roast light, medium or dark, which gives us a few other points of difference when we try to sell a particular coffee.

But origin and roast can only take you so far when it comes to marketing and differentiating a coffee.

This is particularly true when you look at the number of coffee companies, roasters and coffee stores out there, all telling variations of this one story.

So… going back a decade or two… coffee companies began to look for other stories to tell. And the story a lot of companies chose to tell was about the people who grew and picked the coffee beans.

We saw a lot of photos and videos of coffee company founders visiting the places where their coffees were grown. Boots on the ground, and all that.

That was great… until everyone began to tell the same story.

And that’s how it seems to go with the coffee business. As soon as someone latches onto a new storyline, everyone jumps in and does the same.

You can’t blame them, because they’re all trying to sell the same, small brown bean.

Here’s the trick…

Differentiate your business with a story that’s hard to copy.

Occasionally a company breaks through with something different.

Like the folks at Death Wish Coffee.

They have a new story baked into the business name itself.

They’re telling the story of a coffee that is stronger than any other.

They position themselves as “The world’s strongest coffee”.

Wanna try our coffee? Better have a death wish first.

Recently they won the grand prize in a competition put together by Intuit to encourage small business.

Their winning video shows a bunch of crazy Viking warriors in a boat, fueling their bloodlust with Death Wish Coffee.

They follow the same narrative everywhere, across the brand experience. Their packaging is black, their logo shows a skull and crossbones.

It’s death wish all the way.

And it’s marketing all the way too because… well… they never really do explain how and why their coffee is the strongest in the world.

What does that even mean? The highest caffeine content? The darkest roast? The boldest taste?

They don’t even define it or attempt to prove it.

The closest they come is to make a soft claim about their “unique roasting process”. Well, if you know much about roasting coffee, you’ll know to take that claim with a pinch of salt.

But to get caught up with whether or not they can justify their claim is to miss the point.

What they are doing… and they’re doing it really well… is to differentiate their coffee with a powerful story.

And it’s a story that isn’t easy to copy.

Best of all, they have a storyline they can dip into in a multitude of ways for years to come. They now own the Death Wish story.

This is the differentiating power of a good story.

Like I said at the outset, coffee is a commodity. And that makes it a great model for marketers trying to figure out how to differentiate their own products or services.

If something can work for coffee, it can probably work for anything.

And in my experience in watching coffee marketing closely for over 10 years now, the best way to differentiate any product or service is with a powerful story.

So next time you’re faced with trying to create a new campaign or promotion for what is essentially a “me too” product or service, just ask yourself the question…

What’s the most powerful story we can tell?

NOTE: If you want to know more about the power of telling stories, check out my course, Selling With Stories…

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