What's up brand builder Stephen Houraghan here at BrandMasterAcademy.com and in this video i'm
talking positioning versus differentiation versus distinctiveness so we can meet this
debate head on and find out what the biggest marketers in the world are saying about it
before bringing it back into the real world to see how we can use it in our brand building
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in recent years there has been this growing debate around differentiation and distinctiveness and why
people choose the brands that they do what kind of influence that we can have as brand builders
over their decision making process on one side you have some that will say that you just need
to tap into the belief behind what you do that people just by why you do what you do not actually
what you do and on the other hand you have others that will say that there is no such thing or no
real ability to differentiate your brand these days it's all about availability
and distinctiveness so we're going to look at the differences of opinion here we're going to look at
the opinions on one side versus the other side and we're going to break them down and see what they
really mean in the real world so let's start with positioning now positioning has been around for
about 40 years the concept of positioning was brought into fruition by al ries and jack trout
with their book in the early 80s positioning a battle for your mind and this influenced a lot
within the marketing industry and influenced a lot of universities and influenced a lot of
modern textbooks today and that is now the cornerstone belief that you need to position your
brand effectively in order to give your audience a meaning as to why they should choose your brand as
al recent jackfruit said the basic approach of positioning is not to create something new
and different but to manipulate what's already up there in the mind to re-tie the connections
that already exist so what is differentiation well differentiation or your differentiation strategy
is the fundamental reason that you give your audience to choose your brand when compared to
your competitors so your differentiation strategy is ultimately the reason that you are different
from the rest of the market now this has been around for a long time since the 60s when the
usp was the real framework that everybody used as the leading edge of communication so what brands
communicated was their unique selling proposition and that dictated all of their messaging and as i
said that's been around and that concept has been around since the 60s now even those who subscribe
to the idea that you must differentiate or die also have differences of opinion as to how you
can differentiate in 2009 simon sinek came out with a book that was pretty idealistic but really
had a lot of influence at the time on major brand leaders now he came into the arena with this idea
that pretty much all brands know what they do some brands know how they do it but very few brands
know why they do what they do and then he went on to say that people don't buy what you do they buy
why you do it and what you do simply proves what you believe now that book was followed up in 2011
by another book called grow that had a similar message now this book was by a marketer by the
name of jim stengel now jim stengel was the former cmo of procter and gamble so
one of the most influential marketers of his time and as i said his book grow had a very similar
message to the start start with why book by simon sinek and that was that brands with high ideals
outperform the rest of the market and within his research he found that the index that he called
his stangle 50 which were the top 50 brands of his choice that had high ideals outperformed the s p
500 by 400 percent so this started to put a little bit of science and research behind this idea that
brands with high ideals or brands with a brand purpose or a belief in why they did what they did
had an influence over the bottom line and the performance of the business and jim stengel went
on to say that maximum growth and high ideals are not incompatible they're inseparable now
way back in 2002 seth godin who is one of the most respected marketing voices on the market
and there are a lot of marketing voices today he came out with his book purple cow now purple cow
threw down the gauntlet for brands to go out and be remarkable be completely different and
he really believed that mass marketing was dead and you really had to be remarkable and choose
exactly who you want to be for and be unique to that group of people in a quote from his book he
said i believe we've now reached a point where we can no longer market directly to the masses
traditional approaches are now obsolete and 100 years of marketing thought are gone alternative
approaches aren't a novelty they're all we've got left so what is brand distinctiveness
well that's a brand's ability to be able to stand out visually to its audience when compared to its
competitors now visual distinctiveness leads to brand salience which has been proven to
impact the buying decision now essentially the way you provide brand distinctiveness or
the way you make sure that your brand is visually distinctive is by creating as many quality visual
assets as possible or as many distinctive brand assets as possible and these can include your logo
or your image style or your tagline or even your audio now of course the more distinctive brand
assets you have the more effective those assets are more chance your brand has of being remembered
and obviously being chosen in that buying decision now byron sharp is a marketing professor
and a marketing scientist at the erenberg bass university of marketing science in south australia
now his 2010 book how brands grow was an absolute flamethrower to traditional marketing ideals
traditional marketing concepts and philosophies and it really did rock the marketing world because
it went in the face of everything that marketing professionals and branding professionals held dear
about positioning and differentiation byron sharp through his research now believes that
differentiation is not possible and consumers don't think too much about brands and the reason
that they choose brands is largely based on their physical and mental availability
and their distinctiveness he said the most important part of any buyer's purchasing process
occurs before buyers consciously evaluate which brands to choose buyers in effect decide not to
consider the vast majority of brands on the market instead they notice only a few and quite often
only one so who's right and how do we make sense of all this i mean this is the marketing elite
here and they're having a completely difference of opinion they're not having a little debate about
a little aspect of branding this is the entirety of branding these are the fundamental concepts of
why people choose the brands that they do so how do we break all of this down on one hand you have
jim stengel putting brand ideals on a pedestal and that's backed up by simon sinek saying
that people only buy why we do what we do now in reality if we build our brands like that believing
that people are going to buy our brands because why we do what we do then we're going to be left
pretty disappointed because in reality that's not how people are going to buy their brands they're
not going to buy based purely on why a brand does what they do and then on the other hand with byron
sharp people don't just buy based on availability and distinctiveness they really think about the
brands that they buy and sometimes they go out of their way to buy the brands that they do so
i believe that the reality is somewhere in the middle and it's our job as professional brand
builders to decide what our own ideas are and what our own philosophies are and this is my philosophy
there are many reasons that the audience might choose your brand but at its most simplistic
form branding is about providing meaning and the meaning that your audience has with your
brand becomes the reason that they choose your brand you cannot be all things to everybody so
choose what you want to mean to your audience and let that be the reason they choose your brand you