Don’t Be Like Everyone Else

Okay, this one has less to do with website design than it does with marketing in general. We all like to think that our beginning scuba courses are better than the next guy’s. Unfortunately, even if our courses actually were better than everybody else’s, that’s not the way most nondivers see it.

In this age of minimum industry standards and uniform training materials, it’s easy for consumers to get the impression that most scuba courses are pretty much the same. Even if you were to make your course twice as long or twice as involved as the competition’s, there’s a good possibility prospective customers would see that as a drawback, not a benefit.

So, from the customer’s vantage point, what’s to set your courses apart from the others? Unless you do something to make your training stand out, it’s all going to come down to price and convenience.

If you are fortunate enough to be able to offer courses that truly are more convenient than your competition’s, you are very lucky. To do so, however, you’d most likely have to be the only store in town with its own pool, or have access to a private open-water training site that is twice as cool as what the other guys have to use.

Most of us aren’t that fortunate. As a consequence, the only thing consumers may see differentiating your course from the others is price. If you can’t get customers to perceive your courses as substantially more valuable, you won’t be able to get much more than what your competition charges. Can you really afford that?

The fictional store behind our very real sample website takes a substantially different approach — but one that a few real-world stores have done well with. Their position is: How much you pay for entry level training is entirely up to you. Customers choose the options that best meet their needs, then pay accordingly.

Our sample store offers three basic packages for entry-level diver training.

• It’s premium package is based on private or semi-private instruction. Customers pay more for the convenience of an individualized schedule and personal attention.
• Its mid-range package includes everything one would normally expect to find in an entry-level scuba course, plus a package of benefits which could conceivably save students hundreds or thousands of dollars. Students pay $100 more for these benefits (a good deal if they use even just a few of the benefits), yet it costs the store just a fraction of this premium to offer this package to students. The result? The store makes a healthier profit when selling entry-level training.
• The store’s Bare Bones package offers none of the frills, but enables the store to offer training that’s price competitive with everyone else.

On top of this, there are added incentives when students purchase additional training, travel and/or equipment with their entry-level course. At least one retailer, Josh Blair of Chattahoochee Scuba in Columbus, Georgia, has found that offering training packages allows him to turn 50 entry-level certifications a year into 150 additional continuing education certs — with all the added equipment sales that come with them.

An approach like this does several things to set your store apart.

• It creates the impression that it’s the customer who is in control of how much he ultimately spends, not the store.
• It establishes that your store offers choices no one else does.
• It sets the stage for additional sales and profits.

Visit our sample site to see how this works.

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