Differentiation - the Art of Being Yourself
Differentiation is the act of making yourself and your business be different from everyone else around. Differentiation is wonderful and natural. It is a law of nature that everything has a slightly different place or niche or struggle to survive.
On a tree every leaf or branch grows at a slightly different angle from the trunk to maximise its place in the sun. There is a mathematical explanation of this called the Fibonacci Sequence or Golden Section. Your business needs to find its unique place in the sun.
Being in a different slot to everyone else immediately reduces your number of competitors and helps you to find the right symbionts. Just as elephants have birds who groom them for a meal of yummy fleas, and trees have ants that defend them in exchange for sweet sap, a differentiated businesses will find win-win supporters in the right staff, the right network and the right customers.
Differentiation seems to come easily in nature simply because we see the end result of millions of years of hard fought changes at the incremental level. An amoeba didn't just stand up one fine morning and say, "I want to fly to the Moon", vote for JFK and be on his way two days later.
Humans have the unique ability of self-awareness that allows us to make massive changes in very short periods of time. We don't always use this ability (at least positively) but when we do, we can move ourselves from one situation to another with relative ease - relative to 50,000,000 amoebas over 1,000,000 years that is. Thankfully we already all have the seeds of difference in us waiting to be germinated.
How to Find your Point of Difference
This is a tricky question to answer. There are people whose whole careers have been involved in helping people find their purpose or point of difference and I have set out to do that in one short paragraph.
Simply put: You can do anything you set yourself to. There are (or will be when you practise them) things that you are very good at, better than the average person. These are your points of difference. You can then present yourself based on these strengths. Bing, you are done and differentiated!
There are some common traps to be aware of, or overcome, in finding your points of difference:
- I am different by definition because all people are different. I am at the helm. My business is different because of me - that is a nice piece of circular logic but it doesn't prove anything in and of itself. Everyone wants to believe themselves different and special, even as they are doing their level best to live a mediocre life and enforce the failing status-quo. Your point of difference needs to be more than an assumption. It needs to be understood and self-evident, just as Billy Idol is different to Neil Diamond (yet like an 80's Elvis).
- We give good service - service can be a differentiator but all too often the claim of service is lip service. If I own a Lexus, the service people will come and pick up my car at my home and leave me another in it's place. If I own a Toyota, I have to drive my car to the service shop and wait. Lexus is part of Toyota but part of the Lexus difference is great service. If you differentiate over service be sure that your service is truly different - either much more or much less.
* We are cheaper - this is like the service issue above. Price is a poor differentiator because price is only about a third of people's buying decision. Being the cheapest is dangerous because of all the things that you have to leave out to maintain your margins. Far better to be someone really special for a premium price than another me-too discounter. It is best to only be a price differentiatior when you are larger e.g. Bunnings, Big W, Wal Mart. - I'll convince myself that I am something different to what I am - this one I see a lot, especially in younger people. I met a fellow the other week at a success seminar who said his life goals were to 'sleep with 4 models a day, build a moon base and solve all world hunger'. Good on him. I don't want to rain on his parade but surely he over-reaches himself. Better looking people than him have been working on these problems for thousands of years with no real success. Surely he would be better finding what he can really do and practising that till he is good. Which brings me to the last point.
- Not knowing what your dream is - This is probably the core of all the issues above. We all have a dream. We are all, after all, a bit different to each other so following your dream closely must immediately differentiate you. If you are religeously inclined you can say that God put each of us here with a special gift and it is up to us to use it. When we use that special gift then success comes to us. This is what you need to find. It can take a while to get clarity on this but think back to the early days of why you wanted a business and what you wanted to achieve. Think on who those ideal customers were and what you were going to do to make their lives better. The dream lives there.
If you are finding the soul-searching activity a bit difficult then do some research. Ask your staff how they see your company (and watch most of them squirm and lie their little hearts out*). Then go asking your good customers why they like doing business with you. Now the hard part, start asking some unhappy customers why they don't like doing business with you. Be aware that some of what you hear will be very clouded with anger but with a little luck you will start to see some patterns. You could use surveys to do this but I have to admit to not being a big fan. If you don't want to do this face to face then consider hiring a consultant who will do it for you. It should be money well spent.
* of course if this is the case then you have a conflict of values in your business. What you say you are is not what you are in reality This needs to be fixed ASAP.
You can read more about differentiation in action in the About Us page article
If you want me to work with your business then please visit BRM Web Consulting
