Confusing your customers and leads by offering more services

Want to confuse your customers and prospects?

Just advertise that you offer more services than before as Laura Ries explains using the advertising campaign of UPS: “We do more than shipping” (New York Times campaign spotlight).

The UPS Store has a $30 million advertising campaign that should explain a large number of new services, like document printing and office supplies.
Their goal is to compete with FedEx office (formerly Kinko’s).
This advertising campaign sure will confuse their customers and potential customers as UPS is known for parcel delivery. That has been made very clear over many years.

The service from a brand

People and companies expect one certain service or services in just one field from a brand.
This is the service for which the brand stands for.
It has required many years to build this relation between the solution offered and the brand.
Adding on more services can kill the image of the brand and it will confuse customers and leads.

A company cannot be good at many things and different services in different fields.
Moreover if you need a certain service, it is the power of the brand that makes you connect your need with the service of the brand.

If too many services are related to the brand, the image for what the brand stands for will become less strong. And the newly added services will pop-up less in the customers’ mind.

For every new service added, the message of information needs to be presented to your customers and potential customers as your company needs to make clear it supplies this service too.
The more services to explain: the more chance to become boring or to overkill.
The more services per brand, the lesser the likelihood that someone will remember one of the services.
Still each of them requires being presented and explained in detail.
Thus your marketing cost will increase significantly due to:
- The additional content to be generated
- The increase of the number of messages using advertising, email campaigns, direct mail campaigns, …
- The increase of marketing collateral (printed and online)
- The increase of different advertisements each explaining a different service.
- The required efforts of focusing and balancing the amount of messages per service.

Stick with your business

The conclusion is simple:
The company should stick with its current business.
It is already complex enough to pass the message to your group of potential customers.

It can be possible to add related services or products at a slow pace:
- At the speed of the amount of information the customers and the potential customers can digest.
- Not at the speed marketing can send out and confuse everybody.

What does your brand stands for?
Does your company offer one or many services / products for solving different problems?

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