☝️ One Is Not Enough
👑 9 Brand Differentiators
🗺️ Make Strategic Choices
☝️ One Is Not Enough
Volvo is known for safety.
FedEx is known for overnight.
Nordstrom is known for service.
Classic branding logic argues a brand should own one word. (It’s outdated advice.)
Al Ries and Jack Trout wrote in The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, “No matter how complicated the product, no matter how complicated the needs of the market, it’s always better to focus on one word or benefit rather than two or three or four.”
This was good advice in 1993, but not anymore.
Volvo is known for safety, but consumers assume all cars are safe. Safety has transitioned from a differentiator to a table stake.
The same is true for overnight shipping. What was once a transformational service is now commonplace.
In a hypercompetitive marketplace, owning one word doesn’t provide your brand competitive immunity. It can focus your brand and give it direction, but if you find success it won’t take long for your competitors to copy that word and nullify the advantage.
Developing a brand with a strong competitive advantage is more nuanced.
One Stat to Watch
5%
Only 5% of brands are considered unique by consumers, according to new research by Lippincott. Brands like Tesla and Peloton are disruptors and truly unique, but for the rest of us we have to win by serving our customers better.
👑 9 Brand Differentiators
Competitive advantage can be broken down into 9 Brand Differentiators:
- Market Responsiveness: Your company is able to respond to consumer demands quickly, or even anticipate their needs.
- Product or Service Superiority: Your products and services are definitively better than the competition. They set the standard of quality in their industry.
- Production Efficiency: Your company is a well oiled machine. It invests in production, distribution, and total quality management.
- Natural or Human Resources: A natural advantage could be a prime retail location. A human resource advantage might be a celebrity CEO or an irreplaceable member of your team.
- Market Dominance: Size, being #1 or #2, provides credibility and forces competitors to invest disproportionately more in sales and marketing to get similar levels of brand awareness.
- Short Term Profit: Cash in the bank gives your company options.
- Method of Sale: Innovations in sales techniques can open up new markets while cutting costs.
- Distribution Methods: Distribution is your company’s ability to get products to your customers.
- Technological Advantage: Technological advantage can take many forms, but it’s fundamentally the application of software, hardware, and other intellectual property to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, or reach of the business.
🗺️ Make Strategic Choices
Doing one thing really well is not enough to create a sustained competitive advantage.
“From the moment an innovation appears on the market, the movement toward commoditization goes at a rate that has never been seen before,” writes Jean-Marie Dru in The Ways To New.
Competitive advantage is eroded at an alarming rate, but you can slow it down.
Rather than focusing on a word, bring together two or four of the 9 Brand Differentiators to differentiate your brand.
For example, Apple is more than design. It brings together design + ecosystem + supply chain.
The iPhone has an inherent advantage over Android devices, because of the ecosystem. Apple users are held together with the suite of products — iPad, iTunes, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV — versus each product competing on its own merits.
Couple that with Apple’s immense control over its supply chain, and Apple creates a competitive advantage that’s hard to duplicate.
The 9 Brand Differentiators provide a roadmap. Identify two to four differentiators that you can invest a disproportionate amount of time and resources into to improve the value proposition for your customers.
Strong brands secure their position by combining and layering strengths. The richness of advantage makes your brand more interesting, more valuable, and harder to duplicate.
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