You can spend a fortune getting attention for a difference that doesn’t actually matter.
That's the theme of a talk I'm giving at a conference this year. Let me save you $5,000 and a trip to Vegas.
But if you’re heading to a certain marketing conference anytime soon, I’m about to give you a little piece of the strategy of the same thing I’m going teach when people hire me to help them figure out why their brand looks, sounds, and sells exactly like everyone else.
And it starts with a purple cow.
You’ve probably heard of Seth Godin’s Purple Cow. The basic premise is simple: in a world full of ordinary things, remarkable things get noticed.
Fair enough.
But somewhere along the way, a lot of businesses took that lesson and turned it into a creative exercise. Be weird. Be loud. Do something unexpected. Make people stop scrolling. And look, there’s nothing inherently wrong with any of that.
The problem is when the weirdness is the entire strategy.
You can paint a cow purple. You can put googly eyes on it. You can give it a ridiculous name and build a million-dollar campaign around it. But if that cow eats the same grass, produces the same milk, and behaves exactly like every other cow in the pasture…
What have you actually changed?
You’ve created a short term spectacle and not a lasting competitive advantage.
The difference between looking different and existing differently
Here’s where I think differentiation gets misunderstood.
People approach it as a communications problem. Something happens in the brand and you need a stronger push in marketing. They want a better tagline. A more creative campaign. A visual identity nobody else has. A message that makes them stand out.
So they take the same product, the same service, the same business model, and the same customer experience as everyone else… and then they proceed to dress it up differently.
Then they wonder why customers keep comparing them on price, because beneath the clever messaging, the customer still sees the same damn thing.
Real differentiation runs much deeper than that. Real differentiation changes the way a business operates. It changes what you sell, who you sell it to, how you deliver it, what you charge, what you refuse to do, and what your customers can get from you that they genuinely cannot get somewhere else.
It changes the structure of the business itself.
The goal of “standing out” isn’t to communicate a difference. It’s to build a business that PRODUCES A DIFFERENCE. Then communicates it across every interaction.
Your marketing should reveal that difference, not manufacture the illusion of one. That brings me to the strategy I wish more businesses understood and the part I love to teach in a conference or seminar.
The secret: Stop asking what makes you different. Start asking what you’re willing to change.
When I teach positioning, I don’t start by asking people to brainstorm clever ways to describe their business.
I start by getting them to look at the competitive landscape.
What are customers already buying? What alternatives are they considering? What does everyone in the category promise? What expectations have competitors trained customers to have?
Because you cannot make a strategic decision about differentiation if you don’t understand what you’re differentiating from.
Once you see the landscape, the interesting question isn’t: How can we say something different from everyone else?
It’s this: What could we change about the way we do business that would make the usual comparison stop making sense?
That’s the literal million dollar question to outsized growth. Here’s a little exercise you can steal. I won’t even make you buy me dinner first.
The Three-Question Differentiation Test
1. What does everyone in our market do the same way?
Look beyond messaging. Examine pricing, delivery, packaging, customer experience, contracts, business models, product design, service boundaries, and the assumptions everyone takes for granted.
If every competitor offers the same process, why does that process have to be the default? If every agency sells retainers, must you? If every consultant charges for access to their time, must you? If every software company adds more features to compete, must you?
The conventions of your industry aren’t laws of physics, they’re opportunities.
2. What could we change that competitors would struggle to copy?
This is where most brainstorming exercises fall apart. Someone always suggests a free bonus, a funny slogan, or a quirky brand personality.
Those things might be useful. But they’re rarely difficult to copy which means they should only exist as a marketing campaign, not a core foundation of the brand.
Instead, look for changes that require a real commitment. A different operating model. A specialized customer focus. A proprietary process. A radical constraint on what you offer. A delivery system built around an outcome competitors aren’t structured to produce.
The key is that your difference should be supported by the way the business works.
If a competitor can copy your entire advantage by changing a headline, it probably isn’t much of an advantage.
3. What would we have to give up to make that difference real?
This is the question that separates a positioning strategy from a wish list.
Maybe you have to stop serving certain customers. Maybe you have to abandon a profitable service that dilutes your specialization. Maybe you have to redesign your delivery process, change your pricing model, or turn away work that doesn’t fit your position.
Every meaningful strategic commitment closes some doors which is the entire the point. If you can claim to be everything to everyone, you’re probably not making a meaningful choice about who you are in the market.
Differentiation has a cost. The higher the sacrifice, the deeper the commitment.
The question is whether you’re willing to pay it. If you do, you command your dedicated niche more deeply and defend it more easily. If you defend it long enough, your own audience will grant you the most valuable thing in business: the default owner of the category.
Your purple cow should change the entire pasture
Think about what happens when you stop treating differentiation as a messaging exercise.
Instead of asking your marketing team to make you look more innovative, you build an operation that actually delivers something competitors don’t.
Instead of claiming to be more specialized, you structure your entire business around a specific type of customer. Instead of promising a better experience, you redesign the process that produces it.
Now the marketing has something substantial to communicate because the difference isn’t a slogan but a fact about how your business operates.
And because that difference is built into the structure of the company, it becomes much harder for competitors to imitate without changing their own businesses.
That’s the kind of differentiation I’m interested in. Not a purple wrapper, but an entirely different kind of cow, one that produces something the market values, in a way the competition isn’t equipped to replicate.
Because the real objective of positioning isn’t to win the comparison.
Instead, it’s to make the comparison work in your favor. And sometimes, the best way to do that is to stop playing the game your competitors are playing.
That’s what I teach through my Onlyness Positioning framework. We look at the competitive landscape, identify opportunities others have overlooked, and build a position around a difference the business can actually own.
The messaging comes later when it’s easy to generate on its own.
First, you have to give the market a reason to care.
So here’s your homework this weekend: Look at your three biggest competitors. Ignore their websites and their taglines for a moment. Look at how they actually operate.
Then ask yourself one question: What could I change about my business that would make competing with these companies on their terms completely unnecessary?
You might find a better tagline along the way by making your business structurally built around an advantage.
But if you do this properly, you might not need one.