February 5, 2005

YOUR. SAMENESS. PROBLEM.

🚀 Audacious Move™ of the Week

YOUR. SAMENESS. PROBLEM.

Your competitors aren’t your biggest business problem. Your lack of differentiation is.
When your products, service and marketing look like everyone else’s, you give customers little reason to choose you beyond price.
Becoming The ONLY One™ starts with discovering what your chosen customers crave and building your business around delivering it.

Your sameness is yours to fix.

🐑 You Don’t Have a Competition Problem. You Have a Sameness Problem.

Why do so many businesses fail to stand out in insanely competitive markets?

They blame competition.

Too many competitors. Too much noise. Too many choices. Too much pressure on price.

I don’t buy it.

Most organizations don’t disappear into the competitive crowd because there are too many competitors.

They disappear because they behave too much like them.

🐑 They study the Herd

Businesses are obsessed with what everyone else is doing.

They benchmark.

Study “best in class.”

Attend conferences where competitors share their latest thinking.

Read the same textbooks.

Hire consultants trained in the same methodologies.

Then they wonder why customers can’t tell them apart.

You can’t study the Herd and expect to escape it.

The more energy you spend copying what successful competitors do, the more likely you are to become another version of them.

That’s not differentiation.

That’s sameness with a different logo.

🗑️ They drown in claptrap

Then there’s the language.

“Quality.”

“Integrity.”

“Excellence.”

“Customer focused.”

“Innovative.”

Seriously?

These aren’t differentiators.

They’re aspirations every organization claims.

They’re corporate claptrap.

And much of it is narcissistic.

It’s about what the organization wants to say about itself rather than what the people it has chosen to serve actually CRAVE.

Customers don’t care about your adjectives.

They care about what you can do for them that nobody else does.

🎯 DiFFERENT has to matter

Being different just for the sake of being different is useless.
The objective isn’t to be weird.

It’s to create something relevant and unique for the WHO you have chosen to serve.

What do they CRAVE?

What can you deliver that your competitors don’t?

What can you become The ONLY One™ to provide?

That’s the work.

Not becoming “better.”

Not becoming “best.”

Becoming The ONLY One™ who does what you do to deliver what your chosen customers crave.

STOP STUDYING YOUR COMPETITORS AND START STUDYING YOUR CUSTOMERS

Take your current differentiation statement and ask one brutal question:
“Could one of our competitors say exactly the same thing?”

If the answer is yes, throw it out.

Then get close to your WHO.

Discover what they CRAVE.

And create something competitors aren’t already doing.

Don’t compete harder inside the Herd.

Escape it.

🚀 Want more Audacious Moves™?

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Extraordinary businesses aren’t built by ordinary decisions.

They’re built one Audacious Move™ at a time.

Now go make yours.

Cheers,
Roy

• Posted 2.5.05 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
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