Why Every Company Needs to Know Its Core Competencies
By mbretous@hubspot.com (Martina Bretous)
Every resume has a skills section. It’s an opportunity to highlight your top professional attributes to attract employers. Core competencies serve the same purpose for brands and their customers.
Let’s dive into what exactly a core competency is, why you need it, and how to find it in your brand.
You might be wondering, “Isn’t this a value proposition? ” Not exactly. While both are used to differentiate you from your competitors, competencies are what you leverage to support your value proposition.
For instance, at Uber, their value proposition is “Always on, always available.” What’s their core competency? An easy-to-use app and reliable access to its services at any time of the day.
Establishing your core competencies early on is incredibly valuable, as it can inform your marketing strategy moving forward. You can use them in your messaging to attract your target audience and stand out among your competitors.
If you’re a trailblazing company with a fresh product in an underserved market, then finding your core competency will be easy to spell out.
However, if you’re in a saturated market and struggling to distinguish your brand, working on your core competencies will be key to your success.
The sooner you discover what they are, the quicker you can implement them in your marketing and sales strategies.
From an individual standpoint, everyone has core competencies that they leverage in their professional lives. When you want to land a new job, you list those competencies as skills in your resume, embed them in your LinkedIn bio, and mention them during interviews.
If you don’t know what makes you a valuable asset, you’ll be hard-pressed to convince an organization of that. With this in mind, competencies are valuable both from a personal and broader perspective.
Core Competencies Examples
Clever Marketing from Oatly
There are hundreds of vegan milk options out there. What makes Oatly stand out is its marketing.
The brand specializes in self-referential marketing campaigns that make its target audience laugh. Their ads rarely focus on the products and instead poke fun at the ads themselves.
In contrast, one of Oatly’s competitors, Planet Oat, launched a #WeSolvedMilk campaign back in 2021 and released this ad.
Unlike Oatly, they focused on product features – specifically their oat milk’s superior creaminess, then centered the commercial around that.
In a world where most ads take a product-focused approach, companies like Oatly stand out.
Incredible Value from Canva
For many years, those of us who wanted to build brand assets had to rely on products like Adobe InDesign and Sketch.
Not only did they come at a cost but they were also notoriously complex, as they were made with advanced professionals in mind. Then came Canva, a graphic design platform with …read more
Source:: HubSpot Blog
