That’s how it is across professional service markets such as legal, health care, accounting, business consulting, marketing, engineering. Setting aside superficial points of distinction such as name and logo, too few firms are finding substantive ways to stand out from the crowd. And no good comes from that, as business advisor Scott McKain argues in his 2009 book, “Collapse of Distinction”:

If you cannot find it within yourself to become emotional, committed, engaged, and yes, fervent about differentiation, then you had better be prepared to take your place among that vast throng of the mediocre who are judged by their customers solely on the basis of price. It is singularly the worst place to be in all of business.

And yet, that’s where most businesses, service or otherwise, find themselves. Rather than dive into the many reasons for this state of affairs, I’d like to address just one: Too few in business understand how to create relevant distinction.

When I say relevant, I mean distinction that identifies you as different from your competition and is meaningful to your clients and other stakeholders in your business. After all, you may be truly different but if that difference doesn’t matter to your clients or those who work for you, then it’s of no value.

I share McKain’s perspective:

Creating differentiation doesn’t mean you have to become completely, totally unique from your competition from top to bottom. It simply means you must create small, solid points of distinction that are recognizable and important from the customers’ perspective because customers perceive that different is better.

7 dimensions of service brand distinction

So how can you create these solid points of distinction for your service business? I just answered that question for one of my clients and will share what I came up with. I call it the seven dimensions of service brand distinction. I’m confident you will find valuable areas of relevant distinction in one or more of these realms:

1. What we do: The obvious starting point of distinction for most of us is what we offer and the needs we address. Here our differentiation strategy is on providing a unique service or solving an unmet market need.
2. How we do it: We might look to our models, methods and systems we use or the culture we’ve built to deliver our services. Our focus is doing the same or similar things better than our competitors, whether it’s being smarter, more strategic, more creative, more prepared than those like us.
3. Who does it: This dimension asks us to examine our collective character and personality – who we are being as a firm in the conduct of business. This strategy asks us to see our firm as more than a collection of unique individual service providers and find ways to adopt and exhibit a shared set of traits. We’d emphasize training and careful hiring that stress the ability of employees and partners to consistently be who we say we are as a business.
4. For whom do we do it: This looks for distinction in the markets and clients we serve – a commonly used method of differentiating. We would focus on serving niche or specialty markets or parts of organizations that are under-served or poorly served today.
5. Where do we do it: This isn’t just about differentiating on where our offices and clients are; it can also be about where we concentrate our services – the strategic front-end of an engagement, the tactical back-end execution, somewhere between or all of the above. Our strategy may include being the best provider in our service category in our community, focusing on building an expertise and national reputation in a specific industry niche or identifying specific points upstream, midstream or downstream in solving a client’s need.
6. Why do we do it: This is what I would call the existential point of distinction. It derives from our mission (our reason for being as a s business), what we stand for, our core beliefs and values, the difference we want to make. Here we focus on engaging like-minded stakeholders in our overarching purpose and demonstrating we do what we do to make a larger social, environmental or economic difference.
7. Do we do it: Here we emphasize proof. We are who we say we are, we do what we say we do and we deliver what we say we’ll deliver. It may be that all our competitors are saying the same thing. We are the ones who actually walk the talk. Our strategy is on delivering on the client experience we promise, measuring and being accountable for positive client outcomes and cultivating and communicating proof of performance.

This list is not an exhaustive source of where you can find and create those “small, solid points of distinction,” but it’s a great place to start. What this list presupposes is you also have a solid understanding of 1) what your clients want and need and how they experience your business today and 2) what distinction strategies are being used by similar or competitive firms. Otherwise, you run the risk of being both irrelevant and indistinct. Chances are that’s a position your competition already owns. Gladly leave it to them.

Photo credit: MrB-MMX at Flickr

I could only identify two stores along the three-block downtown that were there in my childhood. Most of the businesses appeared to be on life support. Further south from downtown a once modest commercial stretch reminded me of an abandoned cowboy town. Only the tumbleweed was missing. My high school had been leveled and rebuilt on the north edge of town. My parent’s last and once-proud home, across from the school, stood lifeless. And the downtown store my dad started in 1948 and sold in 1980 is teetering on the verge of going out of business. Perhaps the hardest change of all to swallow.

Hometown lake in Minnesota

Little about my hometown seemed as I remembered it, except the pretty lake at its center. It hadn’t died as a community. It only felt that way. So much that anchored my memories of growing up there has now disappeared, if not physically, then emotionally. I told my wife the last morning we were there, I’m not sure I will ever have the need or desire to return.

Business is never usual

As I write this post, the Occupy Wall Street movement remains in full force, joined by Occupy Portland and dozens of other Occupy camps across the country. Who knows what will become of their protests. Something positive, I hope. Regardless of the outcomes, there’s no going back to business as usual. BAU, as I have seen it referred to elsewhere, is a myth. Nothing ever just sits, immune to the one thing we can’t change: the constancy of change itself.

After nearly two decades away, I could see the etchings of change all over the community that raised me through high school. As much as I wanted it to still be the Mayberry of my memories, that community is long gone. Replaced by something different. And if I return in 18 years, it will be that much different again.

Wiser people than me long ago recognized that all that exists is this moment, right now and now and now. The past is gone, the future not here yet. I have made a career out of marketing and communications. That means telling stories. Sometimes the stories of returning to the way things once were. Other times imagining a future yet to be. What feels in short supply are the stories of delight with what it is now, today, in this moment.

Branding in the moment

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,” John Lennon sang. Is it any different for a business or a brand? We make plans to celebrate the past. And we make plans to dominate the future. But what about now? What are we doing and experiencing as an organization today? And what about our customers, employees, markets, competitors? Are we attached to relationships and conditions as they once were or obsessed with a future that may never arrive?

Or are we finding ways to share the pleasures that today brings with the stakeholders that help our business prosper? I’m not saying it’s easy, but I’m pretty sure the business, the brand, the person that accepts change and stays awake to the opportunities present in any given moment is the most satisfied of all.

And right now, I suspect some young boy is riding his bicycle around my hometown lake, oblivious to all but the red autumn leaves blowing across his path.

Source Flickr: By koalazymonkey

This is the backdrop of R.Bruer Company, my bigger story, if you will. Yes, I provide branding, messaging and storytelling for businesses and nonprofits. Those are my services. My bigger story taps into what I believe matters most in our work as individuals and organizations: helping others add meaning to their lives while engaging them in a larger purpose.

Each of our organizations has a smaller story to tell. Unfortunately, it’s often the only one we share. We focus on what our organizations do: develop software, design clothes, grow food, treat illness, remodel homes, educate children and on and on. We carve out ways to differentiate what we do from our competition and explain the difference to our customers. Important stuff, to be sure. Just not the stuff that really floats anyone’s boat.

Beyond your smaller story

There’s a reason your organization may be sticking to its smaller story: You don’t know or have forgotten your larger one. One place you may find it is in what author Rob Walker called the “fundamental tension of modern life” in his terrific book “Buying In: The Secret Dialog Between What We Buy and Who We Are.”

“We all want to feel like individuals. We all want to feel like a part of something bigger than ourselves.”

Is it about us? Is it about more than us? It’s both, and your organization can find its bigger story by being aware that your customers, employees and other stakeholders are looking to fulfill both of these desires, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes separately.

We want to contribute to the common good. And we want to feel uncommon doing it. When your organization recognizes and satisfies these twin needs you have a bigger story to tell. You’re engaging your stakeholders in what matters most to them. And that’s big.

Businesses tend to speak to one end of the fundamental tension: our desire to feel like individuals. Nonprofits usually speak to the other end: our wish to be part of something bigger. Connect your stakeholders to both and suddenly your story takes on dimension like never before.

Think bigger

My business isn’t branding or messaging. It’s helping my clients reconnect with their larger purpose, what makes them competitively unique and how they can be more important to those they rely on for success.

Don’t limit your story to making or selling a better, faster or cheaper product or service. Think bigger. Think of your organization, product or service as what others can use to express or achieve meaning in their lives and make a difference outside themselves.

That’s easier said than done for many of us. Because, frankly, not all of our organizations can honestly tell a bigger story. Our business can’t deliver on the desire for others to feel like one of a kind because we don’t know what makes our business unique. We can’t promise to connect others to something larger than themselves because we don’t stand for something bigger.

It’s not about you

That leaves us with our smaller story. For many, that’s enough. Perhaps you believe the purpose of business is simply to make money. And as long as you’re doing that, you’ll go on building a better mousetrap and leave that purpose and fulfillment stuff to others.

Never mind that your customers don’t see their purpose as helping you make money. They won’t stay connected to your smaller story because it’s about you, not them. Eventually, they turn to the business that’s tapped into its bigger story. Because that’s where they find themselves — and a whole lot more.

Papua New Guinea, an island somewhat larger in size than California, is home to fewer than seven million people and more than 800 languages. There are places on the island where you can encounter a new language every two to three miles, according to Pagel. Some would say that’s cultural diversity at its finest. Pagel would say it’s “very peculiar, even bizarre.”

Source: petersbar via Flickr

The reason? Humans, Pagel said in his TED talk last month, originally devised language some 200,000 years ago as a means of sharing ideas, knowledge and wisdom. “Language is a piece of social technology for enhancing the benefits of cooperation,” Pagel said. So it was “bizarre” that humans should have gone on to create thousands of different languages.

Today, there are 7,000-8,000 languages spoken across Earth.

“It seems we use our language not just to cooperate but to draw rings around our cooperative groups and to establish identities. Perhaps to protect our knowledge, wisdom and skills from eaves-dropping from the outside.”

Research shows the presence of multiple different languages slows the flow of ideas, knowledge, technology between groups, which flies in the face of language’s original purpose.

Isolation vs. global connectivity

As Pagel observes, this apparent natural tendency to isolate and keep to ourselves is being confronted by a powerful modern force: the inexorable march of global connectivity.

Source: @fredchannel via Flickr

Today, we are connecting and communicating with other humans around the world at an unprecedented rate. And for Pagel that begs the question: Can we really afford all these different languages getting in the way of the free flow and exchange of ideas, wisdom, technology? The presence of this flow, after all, is why humans evolved far beyond our pre-human ancestors and other animals.

It behooves us as a species to remove anything that blocks this easy exchange. Pagel suggests humans have reached the point where we are more dependent on global cooperation and exchange than ever before to maintain our levels of prosperity. Which is why we appear destined to be one world with one language.

The anti-business approach of business

Pagel didn’t say anything about the seemingly endless sub-languages within any single language. Every industry and occupation has its own vocabulary designed, as Pagel would say, to draw rings around those in the industry or occupation.

We wrap our identities as individuals, businesses and institutions around our specialized knowledge because it elevates our status or competitive position. The language of knowledge, as much as knowledge itself, is power. So is it any wonder we don’t want others speaking our language?

No, it’s not. But how exactly are we helping ourselves or our organizations by making it difficult to communicate with others? Human language evolved to enable communication and facilitate cooperation. Somewhere along the line we decided to limit how much we cooperate and with whom.

In the realm of business, I can’t think of anything more anti-business. When we hold on to our proprietary language we effectively block people from doing business with us. “Very peculiar, even bizarre,” Pagel would say.

We don’t individually or collectively prosper by erecting language barriers — now or over the course of human evolution. It should be the objective of every business to hear their customers exclaim: “Now you’re talking my language!” One world with one language — your customers’.

In branding, the job of connecting emotionally is typically left to marketing and advertising. History suggests that works for many product categories where competitive differentiation is scant and great advertising is their only hope of making consumers care.

Once a company starts hanging its hat on sustainability, however, the rules change. Branding is no longer a game of emotions alone. It becomes a game of facts and emotions. That takes the practice of branding outside the narrow zone of marketing and advertising and into the broad realm of operations and employee engagement to ensure sustainability practices are, in fact, implemented.

My piece also includes the 10 steps to building a sustainable brand. Check it all out and let me know what you think!

The latest drop in consumer confidence will no doubt discourage many businesses. After all, consumer spending comprises 70 percent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product.

If individuals have greater confidence in the future, they buy more stuff. Businesses make more money and hire more employees. That increases consumers’ ability to purchase more things, their confidence rises and the virtuous cycle continues.

Until it stops.

And stop it did two years ago this month after Lehman Brothers collapsed into bankruptcy and sent stock markets and the economy into a tailspin.

With today’s overall economy only modestly improved, we in business today find ourselves at a crossroads. Do we continue down the rutted but familiar road of a materialistic marketplace, hoping the road will soon smooth out? Or do we choose an alternate route to prosperity this time?

The dead end of material consumption

It didn’t take the Great Recession to teach many of us the path of consumption we’ve traveled for more than a century is ultimately a dead end. That’s been apparent for some time; we have only one planet to sustain our pace of natural resource consumption, and we need two or three at the rate we’re going.

Source: Global Footprint Network

What isn’t apparent is whether our experience of the Great Recession will fundamentally change the way we do business. Ask yourself:

• Is your business hunkering down, waiting for the return of the free-wheeling, free-spending consumer?
• Or are you using this period to rethink your business model, what you produce and sell and how you measure success—consistent with a resource- and financially constrained age?

Confronting ‘the materiality paradox’

The last time we suffered a downturn like this was the early 1980s. When we emerged from that recession, Americans went on an unprecedented spending and consumption binge that continued largely unabated until two years ago.

The era gave rise to what sociologist Juliet Schor describes in her excellent new book, “Plenitude,” as “the materiality paradox.” That is, as products became more valued as “symbolic communicators,” they grew more reliant on fashion and novelty, speeding the cycle of consumption.

“People buy more products and turn them over more quickly,” she writes. The paradox is we value goods less today, but we consume more of them to satisfy our natural desire for social meaning and individual expression.

The non-material consumer economy

If past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, then it’s likely Americans will return to what we do better than anyone: consume. But nowhere is it written that what or how much we consume has to be identical to the last 25 to 30 years. A consumer economy doesn’t have to mean “a-consumer-of-materials economy.”

Much of what individuals and businesses “consume” is far more about experiences than stuff, such as:

• education and training, of all types
• fine arts, crafts
• music, theater, dance and other performing arts
• movies, reading, sports and other entertainment
• travel
• hiking, bicycling, skiing and other recreational activities
• digital gaming and other virtual products

That isn’t to say these and other experiences don’t have associated sustainability issues. The business challenge is to dematerialize the production, promotion and delivery of these experiences as much as possible. But businesses enjoy a head start on sustainability when their core products are experiences instead of goods.

Makers of goods can gain a similar advantage through “cradle-to-cradle” techniques such as upcycling (turning waste material or other used or useless products into new, higher-value goods).

Design for environment and sustainable design practices minimize raw material use and waste. But the jury is still out on whether better, smarter design is the “silver bullet” solution to over-consumption. At some point the prevailing materialistic mindset also has to change.

The road less traveled

The point is: A consumer economy isn’t unsustainable by definition. It depends on what and how much gets consumed. Americans are deeply conditioned to satisfy their desire for happiness and meaning by accumulating possessions. This reflects the persuasive power of professions like mine — branding and marketing — more than some genetic predisposition to shop.

Dislodging materialism as the economic status quo won’t be easy. But if enough businesses choose the road less traveled, the next three decades will look far different from the last three.

Many sustainability leaders in business are already re-conditioning customers to consume less and differently. They respect the material limits of our planet. And they recognize what customers ultimately desire — happiness, security, belonging — isn’t found on store shelves and never goes out of fashion.