By Daniel Prosser, Author, ‘THIRTEENERS – Why Only 13 Percent of Companies Successfully Execute Their Strategy and How Yours Can Be One of Them’. Named one of the 5 best business books in the world for 2015 at the Frankfurt International Book Fair. www.thirteenersbook.com
Everywhere I look on LinkedIn these days, I’m confronted by, “What is your brand?” Or I’m encouraged to rebrand or told that big companies understand the importance of brands (and that I don’t, apparently). And on FastCompany.com, Tom Peters is once again telling me that “Brand You” is the way to go. If you’re like me, this can leave you wondering what to do. Should you relook at your brand once again? Do you even have a brand?
It’s a brand-new world these days, and to say there are a lot of people specializing in branding is a major understatement. Some of these people—like Donald Miller of Story Brand—I have a very high regard for. I listen to them about how to do a better job of telling my story. It’s debatable if I’m making progress in that regard, but I keep on working at it. But here’s the thing: If I don’t know where I’m going and who I am for my clients, what good will another look at branding do me?
I’ve been watching this play out for about twenty-five years now, and I’m not convinced that stopping what you’re doing to refocus on your brand is the way to go. Not yet, anyway. There’s something you need to look at first—something that these branders aren’t looking at. After all, if I’m right, what you want is what a brand is supposed to provide: a distinct product or service that no one else can touch, even with a ten-foot pole. You know it and I know it—you’re different from all the rest; it’s just that you haven’t found a way to position yourself so everyone else gets it. And that’s what you need to do before you even think about rebranding.
I don’t believe brands do what you might want them to do—and maybe they never have. Most people expect their brand to create that competitive advantage, to make them appear different from their competition. Brands don’t do that, but there’s more. Focusing entirely on your brand does something to your business that you may not realize: it locks you into what your prospects (and clients, too) perceive as a commoditized business category—one that all the other wannabe competitors have locked themselves into with you. And now you’re locked in there together, going head-to-head with everyone that looks like you in your market space.
One big category in which everyone competes is quality. We all say, “What makes us different is, we are better.” And honestly, you may not be saying those exact words, but you undoubtedly wish your marketplace believed them. Am I right? If so, then the only outcome possible is for your prospective clients to conduct a competition comparison—a matchup that pits you against them. The fact is that competing with a brand in an existing (from the perspective of the market) commoditized category is a race to the bottom. The most likely outcome is that you’ll win and not establish real value—and when real value is missing, so are the price and payoff you deserve. I know. I’ve been there and done that more than I’d like to admit here.
What I’ve discovered is this: Successful innovators don’t start businesses to compete inside a category—they invent new categories. There’s plenty of marketplace evidence for this truth. Just look at the billion-dollar businesses that have started up over the past twenty years or so and gone from zero to a billion overnight. If they’ve hit the billion-dollar mark, it’s likely they did it not by outcompeting competitors but by isolating themselves in their own business category.
This is your next big challenge in business: You must determine what it takes to separate yourself from your old, cluttered category of business and do the work needed to identify a new category that only you occupy. And I’ll be honest with you—my real goal is to cause an identity crisis for you. That’s the role I play here.
Perspective Is Everything
The view the marketplace has of you is everything. You can’t get away from it unless you are willing to give it up and generate a new perspective of yourself. If customers view you as being like your competition, then you’re a commodity in their eyes. Commodities end up being vendors, and vendors get paid the least. If your customers can get (or think they can get) the same damned thing from one or more other vendors, they have you over a barrel because they can jump ship anytime they want and go get the exact same thing if you don’t cooperate in keeping your price low. That’s vendor territory, and you don’t want to be trapped there if you can help it. And, as you’re about to find out, only YOU can help it.
But Then Again, Perspective IS Everything
So, that’s the view of the market from the perspective of the customer. Then there’s your view. It’s your view that got you to where you find yourself—where you’re lumped into a market category along with lots of similar providers, and you’re just taking what you can get. This is where something has to shift. Changing the stand, you take for yourself is the only way out of the category you’re trapped in. That in itself may take a transformation to discover, but if you don’t do the work on yourself first to shift your view of yourself, a rebranding won’t matter, and a new category probably won’t be visible to you.
How do you find a new category for your business, so you end up with NO competition breathing down your back every time you go to introduce yourself to a new prospect suffering from a problem you can solve? This is the ultimate challenge we all face in how to truly differentiate ourselves. But what you really want is to differentiate yourself completely, in a unique way that makes all others in the same market space unnecessary. You want to put yourself in a position that makes them irrelevant to your ideal client.
The Billionaire’s Secret: Finding a Reverse Salient
Now I’m going to show you what I call the Billionaire’s Secret: what it is, how I’ve applied it with clients in the past, how I’m applying it today—and how you can radically disrupt the status quo in your business and your industry by applying this strange but simple way of looking at the world of marketing and sales.
I’m going to share with you how it works and then give you an example. I want to help you take the very same thinking and apply it to your business now, a future business you might be thinking about, or your career in general.
The Billionaire’s Secret has a name: The Reverse Salient. It’s is a military term that was used principally in World War One and was inspired by the Battle of Verdun. The Verdun Salient was a backward bulge in the advancing German line. The French defenses around Verdun held out and stopped the German advance there, even as other German forces pushed past Verdun to the north and south. This helped stop the entire German advance, because it created a weakness in the German line. The Germans couldn’t keep pushing forward without stretching their lines thinner and thinner around Verdun, so the German generals had to divert their resources to an all-out attack on Verdun—to destroy the French forces causing the backward bulge in their line there. If they succeeded, they would eliminate opposition at Verdun and thus be able to advance their entire line against the enemy again.
That’s history. Let’s go ahead and apply this to yours and my business. I call it the Billionaire’s Secret because if you study the way most successful billion-dollar businesses have grown, it is by identifying a reverse salient—a weakness in a recognizable system (a battle line being a system). Weaknesses are gaps in performance in existing systems, or even failures and breakdowns caused by weaknesses. And it’s these weaknesses or gaps that hold the opportunities that are available to you and me as entrepreneur innovators.
Thomas Edison was one of those capricious innovators who, because of his perspective of the world, saw what others could not. He saw the weaknesses in the systems that held back both society and technology. Almost everyone credits Edison with inventing the electric light bulb, but that’s not what he did—a fact that history has somehow lost. The original idea of the light bulb was invented in 1800. Edison was born in 1847. He left school at age twelve. In 1879, at the age of thirty-two, Edison found the weakness in the light bulb system and invented not the light bulb but what would become incandescent lighting. He did this by discovering how to manufacture a successful and durable filament. And as is the case with most reverse salient’s, when you solve one weakness in a system, you end up discovering or catalyzing the discovery of the solution to other related weaknesses: in this case, the electrification of the United States and then the world. Of course, he had help as the magnitude of the weaknesses grew. But I digress…
The point is, a business is never as viable as it is when it is focused on a reverse salient (the weakness in a system), and it’s not sustainable unless it delivers a signature experience that sets it apart from all others.
In 2009, I began working with a small art consultancy in Houston, Texas. They sold art to the hospital market, and they were anything but the leader in their industry. They were highly skilled in identifying art that belonged in hospitals, but they were struggling because the leader in the industry kept proving to the market that they were more connected to the struggle of their clients—a struggle that wasn’t so apparent to this client of mine. Over a period of months and through study of hospitals, it became known to us that the real problem hospitals face is getting patients to be well enough to leave the hospital almost as soon as they are checked in. Anything greater than two days, and the hospital begins to lose money on a patient’s stay. They want patients to get well and check out as soon as possible. Somehow, the industry leader had convinced hospitals that its art could help patients get better faster and check out sooner. And trying to compete with the industry leader in providing the most “healing” art would be a tough row to hoe.
Instead, my client and I needed to create a new category that only my client could occupy. It came down to my client making a commitment to deliver a “Signature Experience.” This became their mantra for dealing with their hospital clients. They invented a way of delivering a Signature Experience every step of the way—and if the art was a commodity, then the manner in which my client delivered it became the Signature Experience that set them apart from everyone else.
They created this Signature Experience just by showing up differently, beginning with their first presentation to the hospital client. While everyone else in the industry would show up at the committee proposal interview with a slide presentation, my client would load a box truck full of real art, unload it at the presentation site—and show the client actual art, rather than a PowerPoint. They began to get the million-dollar deals that before had been totally elusive. So instead of focusing on beating the competition, they focused on being different and finding the weakness in the system that had limited the impact of their chief competitor. When they found this weakness and implemented a solution, they became the front-runner in their industry.