I once worked in an office that had one of those fancy all-in-one printers. It was a printer. It was a fax machine (incidentally, why is this technology still being used?). It was a scanner. It was a copy machine.
It was a piece of junk.
Have you ever heard the phrase, "Jack of all trades, master of none."? That's exactly what came to mind when working with this printer/fax/copier. It claimed to do so much, but really performed less than mediocre in all categories.
At home I use a Brother laser printer. It does not fax. It does not scan. It does not even have color. Let me tell you though, it prints in grayscale really, really well. I tell you this so you'll believe me when I say I'd much rather have a widget that does one thing well, than five things poorly. Besides Pert Plus, I've been disappointed by the all-in-ones I've encountered.
As more and more businesses transition to e-commerce, competion becomes more fierce than ever. Many have to distill their offerings into two or three specialities. Some companies can only get away with defining ONE thing they really do well. Take for example this pet sitting service, a group offering Christians post-rapture pet care. The service gained a lot of attention when preacher Harold Camping predicted the world would end on May 21st. Pet sitting in and of itself is no longer good enough. It has to be qualified.
OK, so maybe that's an extreme example, but here's another. Remember when Yahoo! was the go-to search engine? You could search, browse directories, find groups and more–all from the homepage. Then around the turn of the millennium a new player hit the scene. It had a goofy name and a crude logo. Still does. The website was pretty much plain white except for a small search bar. All it did was search, but it did it better than anything else. Now Google.com offers maps, email, calendars, documents, shopping, video and more. They didn't expand until they mastered that one thing.
To find relevance in the marketplace, one must ask this simple question. What do we do really, really well? Better than anyone else. Of course it has to be something people care about, but with a vast internet audience it is becoming increasingly easier. Having a solid answer to this question will remind you where you should focus your marketing efforts.