The Business Crime of the Century: 

“In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is a failure. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.” Seth Godin.

 

The business of differentiation is, at its core, all about higher financial performance – want better results – start with better differentiation. 

Brand differentiation success is your ideal buyers see your business as the – only option.  

The differentiation process involves deeply understanding the marketplace and your competitors nearby and far away.

 

It includes removing industry jargon, fluff and mind-numbingly useless words and images that help make your business invisible. 

A potential client reached out to me – 

• They were the world’s largest privately owned business in their sector. 
• Australia was a new outpost – the first few years of growth could have been better – their ideal buyers didn’t trust them – even when their tender was the lowest. 
• Their staff, having come from their major competitors, struggled to get callbacks from their former ideal buyers – who no longer did business with them.
• One hundred different versions of their staff views on what was wrong – the corporate culture, performance, and outcomes were all going in the wrong direction. 
• Management needed to tackle the right steps correctly -yet ever-increasing staff tensions were present – the staff bonuses needed to be attainable – but their business had yet to differentiate. No one knew what the business stood for – why their ideal buyers should only buy from their business rather than any of their competitors. 
• They were like a warship without an engine with no strategic narrative and pitch. 

The failure to differentiate your business is one of the great strategic crimes of business. 

 

• In most cases, the board and the leadership team fail to grasp the significant financial opportunity to inform their ideal buyers why they are the only choice.

Genuinely understanding your competition and finding the best – ‘Blue Ocean’ space – translating that into a business model that acts, thinks and communicates better – that wins more revenue is intensive work. 

Differentiation is the enemy of your competition’s future growth. 

The more your ideal buyers believe – there are no fundamental differences between your business and your competitors the more your content sounds like propaganda.

The problem – over 66% of businesses fail to differentiate, which is a failure to grow faster and more profitably. 

Where do you test for differentiation? 

The home page of a business’s website is ground zero for differentiation. Every potential buyer lands there to test and verify the business -first. 

Your pitch – the sentence or two on the homepage should be explicit – on your why. 

My previous story above of the world’s most significant privately owned business home page says – nothing. 

They have an internal committee that worked on their strategic narrative and pitch – in the end, they couldn’t agree – so it says nothing of note. 

It’s costing them millions in lost revenue. 

It doesn’t matter the size of your business, age, location, industry, or the pedigree of its board and management – you leave profits for others – when there is a failure to differentiate your business effectively.  

Effective differentiation is 22x more memory recall than a business that has not. 

That is less costly to market to deliver your messages to your buyers. 

Is your business leaving profits for your competitors? 

 

Regards 

David