So I guess this is a little bit of old news, but on April 24th, I sent my poor partner (which I love to boss around) to an event called ”Marketing Essentials For Small Business Owners” which is hosted by a success coach named Sue Clement. She always gives out good advice and the time I got a chance to meet her, she was really sweet and kind. Anyway, it was an opportunity to learn and to network so, naturally, I sent my social butterfly of a partner to go in my stead since I had class at BCIT that day.
The content was nothing out of the ordinary and nothing my partner and I had not heard during our time at the Sauder School of Business at UBC. The networking was also a bit hard to do, considering most people came in groups and rarely detached themselves to mingle.
However, there was one thing that really got imprinted in my head. At one point my partner text messages me and asks, “What makes us different?” My brain scrambled to use marketing jargon in fancy sentences that sounded important but were really not. Apparently, this question had been posed to my partner by a curious man that had sat beside him during the lecture. My partner obviously had learned well from our commerce program and regurgitated the exact same senseless but fancy sentences that made the other nod in satisfaction and return to the ongoing lecture by Sue. It was then that I realized Jive had been so desperate in getting new clients that it really had no direction.
Our only competitive advantage at the time is low cost, however, as most business men know, this is not a sustainable way of differentiating yourself amongst competitors. For new businesses like mine, you must remember that no matter how desperate you are at trying to find clients, you have to have a direction, otherwise all your efforts that are directed at no particular audience will seem like a lot of work for little results.
Never underestimate the power of a good target audience and a sustainable competitive advantage. As for Jive, my partner and I sat down and re-thought about our vision and mission statements as well as our competitive advantage. We figured something out, but it’s definitely a secret. You can also never underestimate the power of first mover advantage 
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