Is your business truly distinctive or merely different?

Strategic leaders set a higher bar than just being different.

THINK ON IT: Is your business truly distinctive or merely different? 

There’s a big assumption that I’m starting with in today’s question for you to ponder. And that assumption is that you’ve already done the work to make your business different from your competitors. If not, today’s question should be even more pressing for you to consider, because merely being different is no longer enough.

As a strategic leader, you should be setting the bar higher—to make your business truly distinctive.

Truly distinctive companies have a number of significant advantages:

• They stand out far and above other competitors for their uncommon excellence. As such, they become the benchmark by which other competitors are compared. Most of their competitors will be indistinguishable from one another, some may have readily observable differences, but few will match their level of distinctiveness.

• They enjoy high customer preference and attachment. Truly distinctive companies don’t just have customers. They have fans. And they won’t even think once about going elsewhere. Why should they?

• They deliver on value, not on price. Competitors that are largely indistinguishable from each other compete on price because that’s the only metric that their prospects can discern as meaningfully different. Those with more tangible differentiation can better fend off pricing pressure, but the real advantage is to those companies that are not just differentiated from their competitors—they are distinctive. Customers of these firms know that the products and services they receive are worth every penny and to choose another provider, no matter how inexpensive, would be even more costly in the long run.

Because we work in our businesses every day—and not those of our prospects—we can become blind to what may be considered truly distinctive.

So, think about your business the way a prospect might. If you weren’t emotionally attached to your business, would you say it’s about the same as other competitors, different in some ways, or truly distinctive?

What steps can you take to make your business even more distinctive?

Paid subscribers, read on for a playbook on how to create a truly distinctive business. (Become a paid subscriber.)

“When we are running our businesses and doing our jobs, we think like professionals—and, unfortunately, often fail to think like the customer.” — Scott McKain

---

Thanks for being a subscriber to Strategic CEO. If you enjoyed this post, please share it with a friend or colleague.