Our Perspective
What this means for leaders navigating growth, change or transformation in their organisation.
The Real Risk
Similarity feels safe until it starts diluting pricing power and blurring recall. The quiet slide happens when leaders match competitors on features, add messages layer by layer, and believe louder promotion will fix the problem. What’s really happening is a slow erosion of the few cues that make you recognisable in-market.
Ipsos & JKR found that only about 15% of brand assets assessed were truly distinctive, which suggests most spending is tied to cues that don’t stand out. The strategic takeaway is blunt: mediocrity isn’t a miss on taste; it’s a misallocation of focus that compounds across sales, product, and talent.
Distinction As Strategy
Distinctiveness isn’t a design choice; it’s an operating choice. It starts with narrowing the playing field to one customer, one problem, and one value you’re willing to own. From there, you can construct assets, messages, and proof that reinforce one idea everywhere, repeatedly.
In our experience with mid‑market organisations, the discipline is choosing the edges where you can credibly be first or only—and then committing. To make that concrete, ask where you can set non-negotiables:
- Customer: Who benefits most and is ready to buy now?
- Problem: Which single pain will you be famous for resolving?
- Value: What proof makes your claim undeniable?
Operating Implications
Once you pick your edges, operating choices get simpler and performance improves. Three sharp implications follow:
- Pipeline: More right-fit opportunities self-select; conversion strengthens without heavy discounting.
- Roadmap: Fewer reactive requests; teams align on one story, reducing rework and speeding decisions.
- Reputation: Buyers and candidates recall you faster; referrals rise because people can explain your difference.
These aren’t marketing wins; they’re organisation-wide gains. Focus clarifies trade-offs, and trade-offs improve outcomes.
Measuring What Matters
Leaders should track whether distinctiveness is doing real commercial work. Useful signals include time to qualify, average selling price, win reasons captured verbatim, and spontaneous brand recall in the segments you care about. If these aren’t moving, you haven’t gone far enough.
Think with Google, drawing on Google and Kantar analysis, notes that stronger brands can command prices up to double those of weaker rivals and trim price elasticity by as much as 20% when brand building is balanced with demand capture. That is the point: distinction is not aesthetic—it earns negotiating room, accelerates decisions, and compounds resilience when markets tighten.
Choose to be the only credible choice for someone specific, and the market will meet you where you’ve staked your ground.
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