In their pursuit of developing products and services that consumers will “love,” product developers and marketers have a tendency to “over-engineer” their products – meaning a tendency to try to develop a product that will be “all things to all people…”
Business people are perplexed as to why a national pro-life competitor to Planned Parenthood has yet to emerge.
I admit, it’s frustrating.
But now that I’ve been working in the industry full-time for five years, I believe I better understand the reasons why.
Today, let’s talk about one of those reasons which I’ll put under a broad heading: information…
If you are a salesperson, what would you say if a prospective customer called you, and the first question she asked was if you provide the product that your competitor offers?
If you say to her, “No, we don’t offer that, but what we do offer is this (your product),” what do you think will happen…?
Can you imagine how women facing an unexpected pregnancy see themselves? After all, they are surrounded by a culture that tells them that an unexpected pregnancy is a mistake.
While it’s true, in many cases but not all, that a woman may have exercised poor judgement in doing what led to her unexpected pregnancy, the unexpected pregnancy itself is a unique human being – NOT a mistake…
Several weeks ago, the Executive Director and several members of the Board of Directors of a Pregnancy Help Center located in a large city, asked to meet with me and one of their key benefactors who has a strong marketing background in sales and marketing.
Although they had specific issues they wanted to talk about, I would say the overarching request this PHC’s leadership team had was to discuss ideas on how to compete more effectively against the local abortion facility near them…
“I am looking for a clinic that handles abortions.”
Yesterday, I had the honor of interviewing a woman who, only 11 months ago, discovered that she was facing an unexpected pregnancy.
Filled with fear, she texted the above message to an organization she believed could help her overcome her fear…
Here’s a hard truth: the vast majority – I estimate 80 to 90% – of the 3,000 pro-life Pregnancy Help Centers are not really competing against Planned Parenthood.
A better description, often used in the pro-life movement, for the majority of these centers would be “Pregnancy Resource Centers,” also known as PRCs…
Picking up where we left off in the previous post, I imagine you may have experienced a strong reaction to my statement that Planned Parenthood typically destroys its local pregnancy help center competition.
Perhaps when you attended your local PHC’s annual banquet, they reported to you that they had saved 100 lives from abortion last year. How on earth could that mean that Planned Parenthood “destroyed” them?
Good question….
I remember back in the 80s and 90s when WalMart was taking over the retail universe in the U.S., there were so called “mom and pop” retail stores in many towns that were praying that WalMart would not set up shop in their communities.
A new WalMart in town was the death knell for small retail stores….