Be different

Kevin Jessop, Evolve Research

Why would a client choose you over the competition? What makes your brand special? What’s your company’s unique selling proposition?

Six years into Evolve Research, our company still hadn’t really defined who we were and what made us different. We are a research company and we do really, really good work. But, there are other research companies out there who do good work as well.

When we started thinking about what truly makes us different, we realized we were unique in our size. We were much smaller than our competitors. With just four people on staff, we were getting very big clients.

The big benefit of being small is that we are very agile. Because of our small size, there’s no red tape and we can do things exactly how we want to do it. We can invent how things are done. A lot of our competition was telling prospective clients how big they were, so we flipped that around. Our message has been that we don’t want to be big and we’ve used our small size as an advantage.

For example, competitors in our industry sometimes have their own call centers. As a result, they push these call centers on their clients to conduct research. We don’t want to have a call center. We prefer to work with a network of partners and choose the best call center partner for the job. Our client gets to pick and choose who they work with.

We outsource a lot of what we do which allows us to specialize in what we love: strategy, analysis and recommendations. We outsource everything else. We want to be surrounded by experts, so we use providers who are the best at what they do, which translates into us being the best at what we do. We vet our suppliers like crazy – they have to be the absolute best at what they do.

There really is such a thing as jack of all trades, master of none and we would rather be masters in our industry. We’d rather be small and agile. We prefer to focus more attention on our clients. And that’s what makes us different. If you’d like to visit with me more about our services, please call 405-602-8029 or email me directly at kevin@evolve-research.com.

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