When embarking on any professional relationship, it’s usually easiest to form partnerships with the biggest company or the one that's been around the longest. Many times we assume a partnership will be beneficial simply because of the perceived success of an organization. However, it’s equally as important not to discount the value of the outlier.
As a result of conventional thinking, outliers can be overlooked which creates an environment where most companies end up looking like their competitors. As one Fortune 500 CFO once said, “Our strategy is a good one. We know it because everyone else [in our industry] has the same strategy.” It’s exactly this thinking that keeps outlier companies on the fringes.
The outliers are the ones who innovate, the ones who instigate change, and the ones who push an industry forward. Apple, Amazon, Zappos, and Google come to mind when thinking about industry outliers that have capitalized on being different. They stand out because they don’t think like their competition and the same applies to the promotional products industry.
While the vast majority of organizations are content to compete against each other with similar value propositions and delivery models, there are organizations that seek to distance themselves from that clamorous crowd. These are the outliers.
Outliers understand that if they don’t experiment, they will become the experiment. Sometimes the experiments succeed and sometimes they fail. The important thing that outliers embrace is the need to continue to try something new. Outliers are the ones who dream up solutions for problems we not only face today, but will face tomorrow.
If you do things the way they’ve always been done, you’ll get what you’ve always got. Outliers understand that by doing things that their mainstream competitors do not, they innovate the way business is done and stand out from a very noisy crowd.
Bill is president of PromoCorner, the leading digital marketing service provider to the promotional products industry, and has over 17 years working in executive leadership positions at leading promotional products distributorships. A featured speaker at numerous industry events, a serial creator of content marketing, immediate past president of the Promotional Products Association of the Mid-South (PPAMS), vice president of the Regional Association Council (RAC) board, and PromoKitchen chef, Bill has extensive experience coaching sales teams, creating successful marketing campaigns, and developing branding that resonates with a target audience. He can be reached at bill@PromoCorner.com.