If life gives you commoditization, expand (but don’t forget to differentiate!)

By David Chapin

Frank Diana, Global Head of the Digital Enterprise Solutions Team at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), paved a road map for becoming an emerging digital enterprise. In this exceptional 6-part online series featured on Perspectives, TCS Consulting Journal, Diana presents a compelling case for organizations facing commoditization of their products and services. In his 2^nd installment, he talks about experience-based differentiation.

“With the rapid commoditization of products and services, the speed at which new market entrants emerge, and the rise of Consumerization, experience is the new battleground,” he writes. “When I talk of experience, I mean stakeholder experience. Ultimately, it’s about creating differentiated customer experiences …”

We couldn’t agree more. Even before attending last week’s DIA 2014 Show in San Diego, we at Forma had been approached by a growing number of established companies in the venture capital, specialty chemical, advanced materials, telecommunications, and financial lending and consulting industries – all of whom are expanding into the life sciences and failing miserably at differentiating and positioning themselves in an already crowded and ever-evolving marketplace. At DIA, I met and spoke with more of these new market entrants.

Life science marketing doesn’t come naturally to these organizations. It doesn’t matter how much marketing success they’ve had in their mainstay industries. Nor does it matter how effectively they’ve been able to re-imagine and apply decades of innovative, technical, and research expertise to develop products and services that deliver real value to the new audiences they’re trying to reach. Even the most sophisticated GPS couldn’t chart the right course into the life sciences for these organizations if they’re unfamiliar with the lay of the land.

So, sure … we came away from the DIA floor with plenty of new business opportunities with some of the more established players in the biotech, pharma, and medical device arena. But it’s intriguing to have begun dialogue as well with this new corps of expanding organizations as they thoughtfully examine development of their marketing strategies in the life sciences space. Studying Diana’s road map and attending DIA 2014 are great places to start. And we most certainly hope to meet more of them at the North Carolina Pavilion at the 2014 BIO International Convention this week! Find us at DIA2014@formalifesciencemarketing.com.