When it comes to positioning and messaging, the overwhelming majority of distributors in a recent MDM survey have three things in common:

About 90 percent of distributors believe that they deliver more value than their competitors for a comparable price.

More than 88 percent of distributors place a large emphasis in their messaging on a handful of features: product selection, availability, speed of delivery, pre-sales technical support and professional sales representatives. If everybody is messaging on the same items, it means that nobody is really differentiating.

Nearly 70 percent of distributors use informal methods for positioning and messaging.

This article, the first in a two-part series, explains why distributors hold this belief about their value and shows how they can develop differentiated messaging around a broader set of features.