I read a lot of books about differentiation strategy and how to communicate those differences quickly and believe there is always room for more to increase understanding and clarity over what to do.
Unfortunately this book has two typos in the first few paragraphs which puts you on the look our for more errors. I came close to returning the book and asking for my money back. The first chapter is awkward to read until you get to the section on how to deal with a price war.
I'm glad I didn't because it gets much easier to read and is packed with useful idea about how to select and communicate a differentiation advantage.
However I feel it misses a few important issues.
First, I believe the use of customer value maps and customer value attribute maps could make it much easier to understand the topic and the trade-off between value and price. The attribute map makes the components of customer value explicit. Sadly the book just uses words.
The second issue is that the book looks at differentiation from a sales and marketing perspective rather than a strategic, complete business perspective. The author makes it clear it's what you do that matters and stresses the importance of customer contact points but you need to go further and the book doesn't tackle this in detail. I believe there's a lot of benefit from adapting the value chain concept developed by Michael Porter to review your systems and processes to review how they support the differentiation strategy, conflict with it or incur unnecessary costs.
This will still provide you with plenty to think about if you want or need to strengthen the competitive advantage of your business. The author is based in South America and the examples within the main chapters are mainly from that continent. The book then provides 100 different examples of differentiation analysed across ten different categories from a wider area.
Paul Simister, a business coach who helps business owners who are stuck, get unstuck.
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Top reviews from other countries
Paul Simister
Thoughtful guide to differentiation
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 1, 2018