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Vesa Purho
Development Manager, Nokia
Why do people and companies prefer certain products to the competitive
products? To put it simply, the reason is either a cheaper price or the
perceived added value provided by the product. These two dimensions can be
put into a matrix to create various competitive strategies, and these
strategies should be taken into account in the documentation development. In
this article, I discuss the different competitive strategies and their
effect on documentation.
Low Price, Low Added Value
This strategy is used when a company is aiming for the lowest price by
providing value that is lower than or similar to its competitors'. This
strategy can be used in a tight competitive situation when the other
companies are using a different strategy or as a bridgehead to build volume
before starting to add more value. When a company uses this strategy, the
documentation should follow, providing the minimum documentation with the
lowest possible cost. It might not be nice for persons who like to carefully
craft every word and sentence, but if the product price is the competitive
advantage, the documentation cannot jeopardize it.
High Price, High Added Value
Another strategy is to create added value so that the customers want to
buy your product rather than the competitors' products. If there is enough
added value, you may even be able to charge more for the product. One of the
options for providing added value is documentation. If the documentation,
covering all information not just information in manuals or help files but
also in the interface itself, really helps users in their tasks, users can
concentrate in the productive work instead of searching for information.
High quality documentation can act as a value-adding component to the
product. In such cases, documentation staff must be skilled in user and task
analysis and in using that information to create innovative solutions for
users' needs.
Low Price, High Added Value
Sometimes a company can try to give the customers added value but still
provide the product at a lower price than the competition. This strategy
requires having good knowledge of the markets and the customers as well as
being able to produce the products at low cost. The low cost may result from
economies of scale or efficient processes. To be able to achieve low cost in
documentation, good processes are essential as well as good management of
the content. Project management must ensure that no extra resources are
wasted on creating the content multiple times. Management must focus on
using resources to add value. For example, creating the basic manuals from a
single source and concentrating more on implementing product- and
domain-specific embedded user assistance could be one implementation of this
strategy.
Naturally, there is a fourth combination, namely high price, low added
value, but that is a strategy that no product actually can use on the long
run so I do not discuss it here.
When deciding what kind of documentation your products are going to have,
analyse what is the competitive strategy used for your products and act
accordingly. Note that one company may use all of these strategies with
different products, so what you do with one product may not suit the other
products.
This article is the personal opinion of the author and does
not necessarily reflect the opinion or practice of Nokia.
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