Your Customers Probably Don’t Think You’re That Different

A small team of interior designers spends a whole afternoon on a positioning workshop. The facilitator asks the classic question: what makes you different? After two hours and a wall of sticky notes, they settle on their answer. They’re “collaborative, detail-oriented and passionate about creating spaces that reflect each client’s personality.”

It’s a pleasant sentence. It’s also, word for word, close to what most interior designers would say about themselves. And when the team later asks a handful of recent clients why they chose them, the answers are far more ordinary: “A friend recommended you.” “Your Instagram came up when I searched.” “You replied quickly and could start in March.”

Marketing textbooks have long taught that businesses must be meaningfully different from competitors, and that customers choose them because of that difference. A substantial body of research suggests the reality is more modest, and more useful to understand.

One Like insight: Customers rarely choose you because you’re different. They choose you because you came to mind and were easy to choose.

What customers actually perceive

In 2007, Jenni Romaniuk, Byron Sharp and Andrew Ehrenberg of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute published a study in the Australasian Marketing Journal that tested the differentiation idea directly. Across several product and service categories, they asked customers whether they saw particular brands as different or unique.

The answer was consistently: not very. Most customers did not see the brands they bought as particularly different from competitors, and the levels of perceived differentiation were similarly low for big and small brands alike. Yet people kept buying them. The authors concluded that customers are still buying these brands despite the lack of perceived differentiation, and argued that distinctiveness, being easy to recognise and identify, deserves more attention than differentiation in brand strategy.

A later replication by the research company Millward Brown, using data on more than 6,000 brands from its BrandZ database, reached a similar conclusion: for most brands, the majority of customers do not see them as different from alternatives. A few, typically very expensive or high-quality brands, scored higher, but they were the exception.

These findings are debated. Critics point out that asking “Is this brand different?” may miss subtler associations people hold, and the researchers themselves say differentiation still plays a role, just a more limited one than marketing orthodoxy assumes. But the core lesson is hard to dismiss: the difference a business sees in itself is often far larger than the difference its customers notice.

Distinctive, findable and easy to choose

If customers don’t choose mainly on perceived difference, what does help? The Ehrenberg-Bass research points to three practical things.

Being remembered at the right moment. As we explored in Your Brand Starts Before Your Logo, customers think of businesses in particular buying situations. Being linked in their minds to those situations, such as “a kitchen redesign on a budget” or “a quick refresh before selling a house”, matters more than an abstract claim of uniqueness.

Being instantly recognisable. Distinctive assets such as a consistent colour, logo, style of photography or way of speaking help people identify you quickly and connect you with their memories of you. We explored this in A Brand System Is a Recipe, Not a Rulebook.

Being easy to choose. Clear prices, quick replies, availability and straightforward booking often decide between businesses that customers see as broadly similar.

None of this means differences don’t matter. A real, valuable difference, such as a guarantee nobody else offers, a genuinely unusual specialism or a much faster turnaround, can be powerful when customers notice and value it. The trap is spending energy on claimed differences that customers neither notice nor care about.

Rethinking your positioning

Instead of starting a positioning exercise with “What makes us different?”, try starting with your customers. Ask your last ten clients how they found you, what else they considered and why they chose you in the end. Look for patterns. Then ask two further questions: in which buying situations do we want to come to mind first, and what would make us instantly recognisable when we do?

If you do have a genuine difference that customers value, make it concrete and visible: a guarantee, a specialism, a number. If you don’t, that’s normal. Focus on being consistently findable, recognisable and easy to buy from, which is how most successful businesses actually win.

A few questions can help:

• What do our customers say when asked why they chose us?
• In which buying situations do we want to be the first business people think of?
• What would make us instantly recognisable across everything we produce?
• Do we have a genuine difference customers notice, or are we relying on claims they don’t?

Which brings us back to the interior designers and their wall of sticky notes. Their claimed differences weren’t untrue, just unremarkable to customers. Building their positioning around the moments clients actually think of them, such as “refreshing a home before selling it”, and making their style instantly recognisable on Instagram might do more for their business than any sentence about passion and collaboration.

Sources

1. Jenni Romaniuk, Byron Sharp and Andrew Ehrenberg, “Evidence concerning the importance of perceived brand differentiation”, Australasian Marketing Journal 15(2), 2007.
2. Byron Sharp, “Millward Brown replication – successful brands have low perceived differentiation”, June 2011, summarising Millward Brown’s BrandZ analysis.