Decommoditize your product

If you're successful, people will try to copy what you do. It's just a fact of life.

But there's a great way to protect yourself from copycats: Make you part of your

product or service. Inject what's unique about the way you think into what you

sell. Decommoditize your product. Make it something no one else can offer.

Look at Zappos.com, a billion-dollar online shoe retailer. A pair of sneakers

from Zappos is the same as a pair from Foot Locker or any other retailer. But

Zappos sets itself apart by injecting CEO Tony Hsieh's obsession with customer

service into everything it does.

At Zappos, customer-service employees don't use scripts and are allowed to

talk at length with customers. The call center and the company's headquarters are

in the same place, not oceans apart. And all Zappos employees--even those who

don't work in customer service or fulfillment--start out by spending four weeks

answering phones and working in the warehouse. It's this devotion to customer

service that makes Zappos unique among shoe sellers.

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Another example is Polyface, an environmentally friendly Virginia farm

owned by Joel Salatin. Salatin has a strong set of beliefs and runs his business

accordingly. Polyface sells the idea that it does things a bigger agribusiness can't

do. Even though it's more expensive to do so, it feeds cows grass instead of corn

and never gives them antibiotics. It never ships food. Anyone is welcome to visit

the farm anytime and go anywhere (try that at a typical meat-processing plant).

Polyface doesn't just sell chickens, it sells a way of thinking. And customers love

Polyface for it. Some customers routinely drive from 150 miles away to get

"clean" meat for their families.

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Pour yourself into your product and everything around your product too: how

you sell it, how you support it, how you explain it, and how you deliver it.

Competitors can never copy the you in your product.