by Kevin Perlmutter, author of “Brand Desire: Spark Customer Interest Using Emotional Insights“
What’s our competitive advantage? It’s the persistent question always on the mind of most business and brand leaders. It’s what we’re always working to convey more clearly in marketing and throughout the customer experience.
Despite all the work it takes to run a business, your success often comes down to the differences between your brand and other brands that have similar offerings. It’s why so much of business and brand leadership is about identifying and maintaining a competitive advantage that will attract and retain customers.
Traditional Approaches to Competitive Differentiation
I’ve been in the room with many business and brand leaders who are searching for their most differentiating competitive advantage. What I’ve observed is that many approaches include everything but learning from current customers.
Sometimes business brand leaders find themselves obsessed with competitors – always trying to replicate their moves to stay one step ahead. They invest lots of resources in creating detailed profiles from outside observations. Then, they use what they learn as guide for evolving their own brand.
While these investigations are no doubt important and provide useful competitive intelligence, following the competition is not leading. When all your moves are a reaction to what the competition does, you’re not only assuming that they know what they are doing, which may or may not be true, you’re also always one step behind. I can assure you that most business and brand leaders believe that the competition has it all figured out, however, they probably feel more like you do no matter how good they look from the outside.
Another common approach to gaining a competitive advantage is through brand positioning and finding the “white space” — literally. In these situations, the team often plots the brand positioning territories of competitors on a 2 x 2 grid. Then, the area of white space on the grid shows where no competitor is positioned, and many brand leaders then try to shift their brand’s positioning to that space.
This is an approach to beware of, because it often leads you to filling the space in a way that is opportunistic and inauthentic. It has you selecting a positioning territory that is different, but not necessarily something that your brand fully delivers on. You end up claiming a positioning territory and brand experience that you may not be able to deliver. As the old saying goes, the fastest way to kill a bad brand is with good advertising.
Discovering Your Brand’s True Competitive Advantage
The fact is that your customers know more about your most compelling brand benefits that you do. If you want to discover your brand’s true competitive advantage, I suggest you prioritize gathering customer feedback.
In my work with dozens of brand leaders, I always ask them and their internal teams about what sets their brand apart. Additionally, I always insist on hearing directly from their customers. What I find, time and time again, is that brand leaders and customers share different reasons for what sets the brand apart. While company insiders proudly share the details of their product and service offering, customers are more focused on how the brand experience makes them feel. They talk about the emotional benefits that they feel from having the brand as part of their life – how it helps them be happier, more successful, overcome challenges, or how it makes their life easier.
According to Forrester Research, emotion is the largest driver of brand loyalty. In other words, their year-over-year research consistently proves that how a brand experience makes us feel has the most impact on whether we want to do business with that brand again, or not. Even if two brands have a very similar offering, it’s the nuances of the brand experience that make the biggest difference. Sometimes it’s aspects of the experience that the brand leader doesn’t even realize is having such a positive effect.
The good news for you is that it doesn’t take an expensive research study to gain insight from customers.
Here are two possible ways for you to gather details about what customers see as your competitive advantage:
1. Customer Reviews.
Analyzing customer reviews can yield a treasure-trove of insight, because people share what they feel. You’ll find trends in the reviews – topics and sentiment that are most frequently mentioned. For one B2B brand I worked with, 25% of reviews mentioned the personal service that the company gives its customers. From these reviews, we knew it was a top emotional benefit and brand differentiator.
2. Customer Interviews.
Another way to identify top brand differentiators is by talking one-on-one with customers. By having conversations with as few as 20 customers, you hear about why they choose and stay with your brand, and you’ll start to see common themes emerge. Here are some of my favorite questions to ask:
- What makes this brand different from other brands that have similar offerings?
- If you were to recommend this brand to a friend, what would you say is the number one reason?
- What are 3 words to describe how the brand experience makes you feel?
- If this brand was a superhero, what would be its singular superpower?
- If this brand was to go away, what would you miss the most?
Using Customer Feedback to Set Your Brand Apart
Customer feedback is the best way to find out what sets your brand apart. Even better, it will be an accurate reflection of what your brand experience already does well – not some aspirational positioning territory.
Once you’ve discovered those top reasons why people choose your brand over others, you can then turn those reasons into your most differentiating brand benefits – the ones that your current customers already appreciate, the ones that prospective customers would be happy to hear about, and the ones that give your brand a competitive advantage.
Kevin Perlmutter is the author of “Brand Desire: Spark Customer Interest Using Emotional Insights” and Chief Strategist and Founder of Limbic Brand Evolution, a brand strategy and neuromarketing consultancy which puts emotional insight at the center of how brands spark desire.
