A business will have several key objectives but growth is arguably the most important one. Without growth your other objectives will never be realised, such as hiring and keeping the best employees, increasing your profits and building brand loyalty.

One thing is for sure, you need to find the most effective and affordable way to grow your brand and help it to remain established long into the future. The one thing most businesses do to achieve this is to workout how they are different from their competitors and use that as a selling point to attract their target audience.

In business terms, differentiation is a strategy where your business identifies the one thing that makes you genuinely different from your competitors and leverages this to your advantage.

However, how do you go about this when your business may be exactly the same as another in your marketplace? How do you effectively compete with the No:1 company in your sector when you are nowhere as large or as long-standing as them?

The simple answer to this is to use honest differentiation. You need to shrug your shoulders and admit that you are not No:1.... or No:2, or even No:3 if this is your situation.

How swallowing your pride can boost your brand

When you can admit you are second-best in your niche marketplace you are being upfront and honest with your customers, which is something that they will actually appreciate!

Instead of claiming to be 'the best' at what you do, your differentiation strategy must start and finish with being honest. Yes, this involves swallowing your pride to admit this, but doing this has paid off big-time for other successful business brands in the past.  

For example, we can look at big rent-a-car brand names Hertz and Avis. With Hertz being No:1 in the marketplace with such a huge marketshare, Avis could never convincingly position themselves as being better than their rival, and their customers knew that.

It took Avis to put their hands up, change to an honest differentiation, and admit that they were second-best before they saw their profits skyrocket. By being honest about where they stood in the rent-a-car marketplace the company started to make boat-loads of money!

Avis simply communicated that because they were second-best that they had to work harder to keep up, which meant that they would need to try harder for their customers to be successful.

So, what can your business learn from this and other successful companies switching to honest differentiation? It shows that honesty is the best policy and that stretching the truth in your marketing isn't the way to go if you want to build customer trust and brand loyalty.

From your customers point of view, it can be very refreshing to see a brand being honest with them. This is why you should work with a team such as the Skein Agency to come up with honest reasons why your customers should spend their hard-earned money with you.

When it comes down to your brand strategy, website functionality, or digital & print design, we can help you make this the best it can be. Get in touch to find out about how we can help you.

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Photo by Sheri Hooley on Unsplash