Ask yourself this question: are you willing to take the risk of really differentiating your company from your competitors? In this Vlog, Grant explains that, by definition, if you want to be different, you cannot be the same as everybody else in your sector – and that means taking a risk.
I’ll never forget the day when I told a pretty famous CEO and the rest of his board that he’d lied to me about his brief.
Let me explain. I was working on a marketing strategy day with a very famous business, and all the great and the good from the board had flown in from all over the world to London, where we were doing a day about differentiation. We went through a process, looking at their data, talking about the marketplace and their customers and their positioning, and I came up with several ideas – based on logic, with a bit of creativity – but not off the wall and wacky.
Every idea, one after one got dismissed and I suddenly realised what was going on. They said they wanted to be different, but they were actually terrified of the risk of not being the same as everybody else in their market.
As a marketer, time after time, I get told by customers that differentiation is their real problem. They want to stand out, they want to be different from everybody else. But ask yourself this question, are you willing to take the risk? Because by definition, if you want to be different, you cannot be the same as everybody else in your sector and that means taking a risk.
Being a ‘me too’ brand is okay. There are very, very successful businesses out in the marketplace that just do the same as everyone else and take their share of the marketplace. But if you want to be different, it means being different.
How many companies would have got pitched the idea of having meerkats representing their brand and just felt it was too risky, too wacky, and too off the wall? And they may have been successful doing something else, but they wouldn’t have stood out the way they do.
There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order to facilitate the readability of the written English
Comments
So so true. I’ve had many clients say to me when I suggest a marketing idea to them, “Oh Tim, we could NEVER do that!” Too many business owners are over concerned with what people will think about them rather than taking the RISK Grant talks about.
Absolutely Tim. It takes courage to be truly different.