In tough times—hard times, difficult times—the customer is squeezed. They have less money as the cost of basics keeps rising: electricity, water, rates and taxes, medical expenses, fuel. So when they do spend, they want to squeeze as much value as possible out of every rand.
What does this mean for you as a business owner?
It means price becomes the main—and often only—thing customers look at. Your business is steadily being commoditised, and it will get worse. Once customers see you as a commodity, loyalty disappears. In fact, “loyal customers” start to feel like a bit of a myth. You’re simply the business they’ll buy from if your price is lower than the next one.
This is happening across almost every category. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a hairdresser, physiotherapist, small retailer, plumber, or electrician. The only professions that seem to have largely escaped this are dentists, certain medical specialists, lawyers, accountants, and tax advisors. Why that is—we’ll unpack another time, but not here.
This piece is about recognising the commodity trap.
And what does that trap look like? Lower sales mean fewer people thinking about you. That leads to less income, which means you have to work harder—then harder still. It becomes a cycle. One expert in this space calls it a “death trap.” You become invisible. You don’t stand out. You become just another option.
We see this everywhere. And I’m not immune to it either. If something is cheaper somewhere else, I’ll often go there. It’s only in certain categories—where I place a higher value—that I’ll spend more.
Take a simple example: ground coffee. I’d rather buy from a specialist coffee shop than pick up a generic blend from a supermarket shelf. The specialist offers variety, knowledge, and guidance—someone who can actually explain the blends. At a supermarket, you’re staring at a label like “Italian medium roast” with no real sense of what that means. Interestingly, the specialist is often even cheaper—but even if they were slightly more expensive, I’d still choose them.
It would be foolhardy to think you can advertise your way out of a commoditisation trap. You can’t. If anything, it often accelerates the problem.
And escaping it? That’s not a quick fix. It’s not something a young marketing “guru” can patch together, nor something solved with outdated thinking from decades ago. It requires serious strategic depth.
For now, here’s some homework:
Look at businesses around you—any businesses—and try to describe, in your own words, how they’ve avoided the commodity trap. What makes them different? Why aren’t they competing purely on price?
We’ll come back to those answers another time. Because what it really takes to escape this trap—and what’s actually going on beneath the surface—is far more demanding than most people realise.
