"Most businesses are location-dependent, whether it's a grocery store, a restaurant, a service-business, or a professional office," says John Schallert, who started in the field with Hallmark Cards over 25 years ago and whose consulting firm now leads Destination Business BootCamp in Longmont, Colorado."Traditionally, people market to their local area, within 15 minutes. The problem is in today's economy, you need more."
When he first started his consulting firm almost two decades ago, his work often involved helping local businesses in small communities and Main Street districts learn to compete with encroaching big-box retailers such as Wal-Mart- but now the landscape has shifted.
"Wal-Mart's not the problem anymore." Schallert says. "If owners are still thinking that 'my differentiation starts in my marketplace, in my shopping center, in my small town,' they're competing against the wrong competitors and their strategy is short-sighted.
"It's not how you're different in your marketplace, how you get people to stay in your town, shop in your downtown, or not go to the big city. That's still a challenge, but the main goal now is how do we keep thos dollars from going to an Internet business that pops up every 3 seconds, or the billions of direct-mail catalogs that are mailed out each year?"
The answer, he says, is differentiation - identifying precisely those qualities that set your business apart from others in the field. The strategy attracts customers from both near and far, and for some businesses, pulling customers from hundreds of miles away.
"Becoming a Destination comes about by using a proprietary business differentiation process that I teach," says Schallert, who conducted his first Destination BootCamp in 2002.
"What businesses learn is you don't have to beat your competitor in every category. You have to beat them in two or three key categories. You're targeting consumer hot buttons, and we know the buttons to push that consumers immediately respond to."
For example, he once met an older seamstress in a small Florida city who was deeply discounting her work to attract business - working long hours and making little money.
Schallert learned that she was once the lead seamstress for the Barnum & Bailey Circus, where she traveled the world to repair ripped ringmaster jackets. That set the business apart and allowed it to grow by attracting more customers' interest.
Schallert says such encounters with small business owners, side trips from his travels to seminars- around 80 small, often blighted towns, downtowns, and cities a year, led him to develop his fourteen step destination-differentiation strategy.
"My first clients were small, struggling downtowns. I'd finish my 90-minute workshop and the downtown director would take me into 10 to 15 businesses in a day," he says. "I'd inevitably meet somebody that would say 'I'm doing these things differently from everybody else and my business is doing fine.' READ MORE
Jon Schallert is an internationally-recognized speaker and business expert specializing in teaching businesses and communities how to turn themselves into Consumer Destinations. Schallert will be featured as a Keynote Speaker at the 2012 DCI Annual Conference, Design Develop and Deliver: Partnerships for Shaping Vital Downtowns.
