Chapter 9

Everything You Need to Know about Your Unique Difference (in about an Hour)

“WHERE IS THE CENTER?”

When you ask experienced business people what a difference is, it’s amazing how few can actually tell you. They react like it’s a silly question, then they offer up a slogan, a generic claim, a piece of puffery, a nuance, or a cliché—anything but a real difference.

And yet a real business difference is the most important distinction you’ll ever make for your career or your company. A difference is not just a word, it’s a term of selling science, a condition of measurable value, the reason potential customers think you will take away their pain or make their life better. It’s a perceived distinction that persuades me to buy; in other words, it’s a selling difference.

If you want to be an entrepreneur, you want to be able to discern a genuine, meaty difference in your sleep. In commercial enterprises—in capitalism itself, where customers have free choice in the marketplace—this is the center.

A selling difference is the one thing that’s most unique, important, and memorable that only you offer, that makes you the number one choice versus your competitors. It’s the tipping point of customer choice because it tells the world you’re the only, the most, or the best in their price range.

Whether the difference is 1 percent or a 100 percent, it doesn’t matter—remember, an inch is as good as a mile when it comes to winning—so long as it’s obvious, important, and believable to the customer. Your difference sets your business apart and sets you up for success.

A true difference benefits you in three ways: it guides how your product is designed and will perform, it guides how customers perceive you, and it guides what you tell the world that will make you famous. All three add up to what you stand for in the customer’s mind. And that is the definition of a brand.

SPECIFIC IS TERRIFIC

If you take away one practical tip from this chapter that you can put to use tomorrow, it should be this: real selling differences are almost always specific. There’s no easier rule to implement for a lower cost and a higher yield that will sharpen your difference and help your brand get famous.

Put actual differences up next to puffy slogans and you can really see the contrast.1

“20 percent lower rates because we make the loans” is a difference. “Engineered to Amaze” is a slogan.

“Seven Whole Grains on a Mission” is a difference. “Bursting with Goodness” is a slogan.

“We give you Fanatical Support” (which you then prove by picking up the phone on the first ring) is a difference. “Your call is very important to us” is a slogan.

“America’s number one 4G network” is a difference. “Passionate about better coverage” is a slogan.

“15 minutes saves you 15 percent” is a difference. “The insurance company on your side” is a slogan.

“100 percent fresh, never frozen” is a difference. “Now that’s good eatin’” is a slogan.

“Tulsa’s most popular tranny shop, ‘cuz transmissions are all we do” is a difference. “We treat transmissions right” is a slogan.

After reading a few of these examples, think back to the commercials broadcast during the most recent Super Bowl (if you can still remember them, that is). You may notice that many of today’s richest, most sophisticated advertisers don’t seem to have a clue about what their difference is or how to express it. They spend millions on ads that provide customers with no idea who’s even selling to them, let alone why in the world we’d possibly need them. They seem to be in thrall to gurus and soothsayers who think that selling the product is the least important part of the advertising experience they are creating.

Well, let’s be clear: it’s okay for them to waste billions of dollars on frivolous puffery, but it’s not okay for you. As a budding entrepreneur, you can’t afford it—in fact, you can’t afford to waste any of your scarce and precious resources (of money, time, and energy) on vague, non-specific messages. You need a real difference to tell the world about in the clearest, most penetrating terms, and you need it the day you open for business.

You need it because for customers, the Unique Difference is what your business is all about. If not, what is the point? Customers don’t care that you need the business to feed your family. They care that you’re offering them a Unique Difference that solves a problem—one that’s worth risking their hard-earned dollars on.

NO DIFFERENCE? THEN YOU’RE A COMMODITY

Without a difference, you forfeit the big strategic advantage you should have as a nimble, creative, problem-solving entrepreneur. You’re now a commodity and that means you no longer have customers, you have counterparties. You’ve conceded that they can buy something of equal value from any of your competitors. And when that happens, your only hope is to have the lowest price. You’re like gasoline: a legal definition, not a differentiated product, and certainly not a true brand. It’s a brutal position to be in if you want to control your own fate and rise above the pack.

Graham Weston spent time in the cattle business when he was growing up. He discovered that the livestock industry was based entirely on efficient production. You tried to minimize your costs, then you went to market and the price you got was what you got, even if it was far less than what you’d spent during a year of hard work. You had zero discretionary power to control customer preference by creativity or risk, and no way to otherwise outwit or out-service your competitors.

That’s what happens to you when you’re stuck in a commodity business.

Graham learned from the experience that price minimization is really value minimization. When he joined Rackspace, he and his partners made sure that the company was built on a difference they could design, improve, and adapt from day one, rather than hoping to cut corners and somehow turn themselves into the low-cost provider. They established standards and values that enabled them to serve customers in a way that set them apart. Having a Unique Difference has helped them escape commoditization and the business dead-end it inevitably implies.

THERE’S ALWAYS A DIFFERENCE—IF YOU KNOW WHERE TO LOOK

Every business has a true selling difference in waiting if you know where to look. As an entrepreneur you’re already granted a differentiating head start, simply because you are a unique individual who brings a unique set of eyes, life experience, perceptions, and passion to whatever product or enterprise you create. Entrepreneurs have found ways to differentiate practically everything under the sun. Nike differentiated Air, Florida differentiated sun, Perrier differentiated water. Kentucky differentiates the grass its racehorses eat. Idaho not only differentiated potatoes, it differentiated dirt.

But identifying your Unique Difference isn’t always obvious or easy. The masters of differentiation, the makers of the great brands have spent decades perfecting the secrets of distinctiveness. Add the timeless rules that follow to your bag of tricks and you’ll find a difference that sets you apart no matter what business you may be in.

In fact, you’re going to find that most of the time, companies have too many differences to choose from, not too few. The answer is so often the one that’s obvious to everyone but you, simply because you’re too close to it. You may have 10 great differences to choose from. Your job is to identify which one is the most distinctive. Then you have to commit to it and stick to it. It’s one of the hardest choices any business leader ever makes, but also one of the most important.

ANATOMY OF A SELLING DIFFERENCE

The most powerful difference is always one thing that sets you apart from others—not two or ten features jammed together. It’s one attribute that’s important to the target customer, one thing that you do best, most, or only. It can be any one of a hundred attributes: the fastest, the healthiest, the most durable, the most reliable, the most attractive, the sexiest, the safest, the most prestigious, the largest, the strongest, the lightest, the best priced, the most energy-efficient, the most authentic, the softest, or the hardest. The safest tire. The fastest human. The only shoes that breathe. All great brands originally built themselves on a single proposition like this and they still do. That’s because the masters know a rule of thumb for differentiating called . . .

THE ONE ITEM OF CARRY-ON RULE

Today our senses are assaulted with about 500 billion messages a minute. But the human brain has a defense mechanism for handling this chaos that it’s used since prehistoric times. We call it the One Item of Carry-on Rule. Here’s how it works. Out of the barrage of features and benefits and details a seller might throw at us about a product, our brain stubbornly chooses just one to remember—the one idea it deems most interesting and important—and that’s the one we file in the overhead bin. All the rest get left at the curb. By a series of unconscious shortcuts, heuristics, and gut feelings, we instantly surmise the heart of the matter, so we’re ready to make snap decisions and take emergency action on the least amount of information. When time is of the essence—like when a saber-toothed tiger used to decide we looked like lunch—this is a basic survival strategy.

As entrepreneurs, our job is to tailor our message to work with the One Item of Carry-on Rule. That means that, in today’s hypercommunicated world of choice that too often blurs into a sea of sameness, our first order of business is to find the one unique, important, and own-able “best” that sets our product apart. If we choose the right difference (and if our product then performs as promised), they’ll love us for it.

There is a name and a structure for this very critical idea that differentiates your business. It’s called a Dominant Selling Idea.

YOUR DOMINANT SELLING IDEA

A Dominant Selling Idea (DSI) is your single most important advantage—the one item of carry-on your customers will choose as their primary reason to buy.

A difference needs five ingredients to be a DSI. You must ask a prospective difference to stand up to these simple tests. It must be:

A DSI with all five attributes is the heart of what brand marketers call positioning. A position is simply the place you own and occupy in the customer’s mind that nobody else does. It’s the center of gravity we’ll build from when we get to talking about making ourselves famous through branding.

Seeing the Dominant Selling Ideas All around Us

DSIs are everywhere. The more you notice them, the better you’ll get at crafting your own. In the days when TV and radio were undisputed kings of the media world, broadcast advertisers were brilliant at carving out and expressing DSIs, many of which have lasted for generations. Like:

• M&M’s: the little chocolate pellets that come with a shiny shell in pretty colors so the chocolate doesn’t rub off and make a mess . . .
• Wheaties: cereal so nutritious, it makes you a winning athlete . . .
• Hall’s Throat Lozenges: the ones with unique, nose-clearing menthol fumes . . .
• Timex watches—the most durable watches . . .
• Pork—It’s a lean, white meat like chicken . . .
• Volvo is the safest car . . .
• BMW is the car with the best German engineering . . .
• Rackspace has the world’s number one customer service in the cloud . . .

Now, please note—the italicized words are the Unique Differences expressed in everyday language for a few famous brands. It may be that, as you read the list, your mind was whispering you, repeating some familiar phrases: “M&M’s Melt in Your Mouth, Not in Your Hand,” “BMW is The Ultimate Driving Machine,” “Timex Takes a Lickin’ and Keeps on Tickin’!,” Those are the catchy taglines for these differences written as Micro-Scripts—those remarkable storytelling phrases that your mind loves to remember and repeat. When a Micro-Script conveys a DSI, it packs a branding punch that is difficult to match.

Advertisers used to be great at writing unforgettable “elevator pitch in a phrase” Micro-Scripts, and you can too. You don’t need to have an ad agency and a big marketing budget. Some of the best Micro-Scripts in the world are written by everyday entrepreneurs who have nothing more than a true love of their product and their customers.

At Rackspace, the Micro-Script for “the world’s best customer service in our business” is “Fanatical Support.” If you go to the company website, you’ll see pictures of Rackers who’ve won the Service Person of the Year Award. What they get to put on and wear proudly in front of all their cheering teammates, like the yellow jersey in the Tour de France, is a real live straightjacket—a vivid (if tongue-in-cheek) emblem of the sheer insanity required to live up to that unique and unforgettable tagline.

Graham Weston remembers the origin of the phrase: “Fanatical Support is an expression of our difference that has guided our decision making every day since Racker David Bryce shouted it out for the first time at a company rally over 10 years ago and everybody cheered. It wasn’t a fancy ad agency creative who came up with it. It was just one of us, a team leader who happened to love his company, his product, and his teammates. Our contribution was to hear it and recognize it, that’s all.”

If you’re listening carefully to employees, customers, friends, and stakeholders, you’ll hear great language that can be turned into taglines and rallying cries, too.

We’ll talk more about this kind of UnStoppable language in Chapter 12, when we discuss how to make yourself famous.

The Smartest Marketers Still Use Dominant Selling Ideas

Many criticize the modern mavens of meaningless marketing (none more than we do), but there are still superstars who emerge with strong, clear DSIs and have the meteoric market share to show for it. These are the folks who love the idea of standing for a crystal-clear difference in the mind—and are savvy enough to say so.

Here are some modern-era DSIs for brands you’ve probably noticed:

And here are some other DSIs you can spot just driving down the road: The fastest outboard engine, the real New York style bagel place (in Bangor, Maine), the unbreakable line of laptops, the highest mileage hybrid, the online dating website for lawyers, the only organic local farmer’s market, and the shoulder surgery specialty group.

There’s an amazing amount of selling information contained in each of those DSIs. Each one provides potential customers with a great reason to buy.

The point is that devising a DSI for your product isn’t brain surgery. It’s something much simpler yet even more important—brain singularity.

Remember, Without Performance You Have Bupkis (Nothing at All)

Not all products with a DSI can boast a big budget and a famous tag line. But every one must deliver consistent performance as promised that proves the difference through tangible action, no matter what. Without it, your difference is hot air and the perception of your product in the customer’s mind (which is equivalent to your brand) will be hot air, too. With it, you can often succeed without advertising it all. Your customers will do the talking for you . . .

Volvo is the legendary safe car. Recently, Volvo became newsworthy again because the century-old company was named by 70 percent of consumers as the world’s safest car in a global survey—despite the fact that the “safe” tagline hasn’t appear in an ad in decades! The DSI is kept going by the word of mouth. Customers and mechanics still talk about features like the famous “steel safety cage,” and the fact that Volvo has been unilaterally responsible for most of the big safety innovations in cars since its inception—from the three-point seatbelt to antilock brakes. And I read a little while ago that they’re keeping the legend alive by announcing a company-wide mission to build an injury-proof car by 2013.

That’s a 100-year-old heart that’s still differentiating, folks.

Since we’re talking about cars, Toyota is “the car that doesn’t break.” Not a bad DSI. This one has never been in their advertising or their tagline. (Few people actually remember any of their taglines.) But after polling all 27 Toyota owners in the neighborhood, talking with three local mechanics, and hearing everyone lead with a version of the same idea—“they never come in for repairs,” or “they easily go 300,000 miles,” or “they don’t break,” or “only Hondas even come close in reliability”—the point was installed in our heads and is now being passed along to others.

And Starbucks, the brand so many gurus (used to) love to talk about, used neither a tagline nor any advertising at all during its historic rise. All they did is show up on every street corner and in every mall and bookstore—and perform. They featured a European-style coffeehouse atmosphere and coffee selection. They created their own branding language, using words like Venti and Grande. And they not only let you sit there for hours, they encouraged you to do so without feeling guilty. They gave you free Wi-Fi. After your home and your job, they wanted to stand out in your mind as “your third place.” You walked into and sat down in the Unique Difference at Starbucks. They lived it, and to millions, the proof was obvious.

Starbucks’s epilogue: Eventually, because a cup of java at Starbuck’s was so expensive (some people refer to the chain as “Four Bucks”), because they opened too many stores too quickly, and because they started cutting corners on things like latte preparation, Starbuck’s DSI began to morph in a lot of customer’s minds, and their business began a historic dip. They now appear to be bringing it back.

The story just shows that no difference can rest on its laurels these days. It’s the job of the CEO to monitor the UnStoppable Six every day. Your difference is too fundamental to your survival for you to delegate it to surrogates.

What If Someone Else Already Owns the Unique Difference You Want?

In other words, what if you check and someone is already number one in your category? What then?

It’s a problem faced by UnStoppable differentiators every day—and the solution is simple.

If someone else is already number one in your category, you have to adjust your specialty to the right or left and invent a new category to be the best in.

For instance, if there are already three regular dentists in town, become the children’s dentist and you’ll be instantly set apart. If there are five children’s dentists, you may want to be become the children’s orthodontic dentist.

Enterprise Rent-A-Car became the biggest rental company in America not by trying to be a me-too entrant in the airport car rental category, but by carving out a new category: “The rental car for when you’re not at an airport.” In fact, as a symbol of their difference, because they knew your car might be in the shop and you have no way of getting to their lot, Enterprise told the world “We’ll Pick You Up.” Call them on the phone right now and they’ll repeat the same tagline.

Choosing Your One Unique Difference out of Many: The Tests

Remember, your big difference is not every feature and benefit in your value proposition—it’s simply the one thing you’re best at that’s most interesting and important to the customer.

To begin with, if you can fill in just one of these blanks in your category, you’re potentially looking at your superlative attribute, the first of the five DSI ingredients:

Then, you have to test for the other four ingredients. Is your big attribute of major importance to your target audience? Is it believable for you to say it? Is it true? Do you prove it every time without fail in a measurable way? And last, is it own-able, or is it already preempted by someone else?

The answers to these questions will tell you whether you’ve uncovered your DSI—or need to keep searching.

HOW RACKSPACE DISCOVERED ITS DIFFERENCE

The founders of Rackspace tried two versions of a Unique Difference in their category of renting computing space on servers (later called managed hosting), before getting it right on the third try. Luckily for them, they knew they had to find their Unique Difference, and started their quest it on day one; once they found it, they focused on it with a vengeance. Graham Weston recalls the process:

“Finding the difference we could stand for was such a priority, that within the first month of opening our doors, we spent the money to travel from Texas to Connecticut to meet with the legendary differentiation expert, Jack Trout, co-author of an original book called Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. Jack was a great mentor in forcing us to focus as though we were already a great big company with a superior brand.

“Although we didn’t have terms like Dominant Selling Idea then or its five ingredients, that’s the process we followed until all five fell into place for Rackspace.

“The first difference we tested we could call, ‘Customized, dedicated servers for geeks and techies who could save money because they wouldn’t need any customer service!’ It’s hard for people who know us now to believe that we started out as the ‘you trade a low, low price for no, no service’ company at the beginning.

“Problem was, when you put it up to the superlative, important, believable, measurable and own-able test, it failed on superlative and own-able. There were competitors who could and did make the exact same offer of dedicated servers. So we tried a new big difference after a few months.

“The second position we tried was, ‘Internet Servers Made Simple,’ the classic ‘we’re the ones who make it easy’ strategy. We even created a software tool on our website called the configurator that let techies set up their own servers online, an innovative idea back around 2000.

“Again, we found we couldn’t hold onto ownership of this position long term. Customers could easily build configurators themselves and match our ease-of-use claims.

“And then, we found the DSI that customers told us they wanted. Amazing to us at the time, it was the opposite of our first assumptive position.

“It happened when some very irate customers who had had major technical problems, but were unable to get the service they needed, called us directly and slammed us for it.

“It was the dawn of the obvious. The industry’s me-too standard was to offer little or no service, assuming techies could handle it. But there are always problems with technology. Bigger, more sophisticated companies with critical-mission websites needed to find a provider who they could trust for superior, 24/7 service, and when they found it, they would pay for it.

“Nobody in the industry was offering it. It was expensive to deliver, difficult to implement, and thus wide open for us to own. Investors and experts told us it was foolish to buck the tide and risk the added cost. But our key customers were saying the opposite.

“So we took what was then considered a big entrepreneurial risk. We knew we had to go all-in or nothing to make world’s best customer support believable and tangible for the industry. We bet our company on it. Not long after, our focus on this difference brought us the words Fanatical Support, which no company that was not as committed to service as we were ever would have adopted as a tagline. But we did, because we knew then that that’s who we were. Before long, the industry knew it too—and Rackspace really took off.”

We’ve shared Graham’s story at such length because it illustrates several of our key principles, including:

• Ideas and differences change.
• Entrepreneurs need to be adaptable.
• Learning to succeed with customers is paramount.
• Daring pays dividends.
• Once you find the center, hold onto it come hell or high water.

It’s also important to see that finding that one big difference is vital not only for what you do—your product and your performance—but for what you’re going to say that makes you famous and turns you into a great brand. So your Unique Difference has an overlapping function that ties together the Strategic Three and the Tactical Three.

THE UNIVERSAL PARADOX

Paradoxes abound in the world of The UnStoppables, just as in life.

The paradox when it comes to positioning (i.e., finding your DSI) comes down to this:

The narrower you focus your difference and your message, the bigger your difference grows and the wider your message goes.

The fewer things you say in each speech, the more you are heard.

The more specific you are, the more generally your benefit gets applied.

Why? Because being number one in one thing, like safety, is not only easier to remember and repeat, thanks to the One Item of Carry-on rule; it also brings reams of other positive associations along with it, like quality construction, superior technology, genuine corporate caring for customers, and so on.

Win the gold medal in one Olympic event, and the world will naturally assume that you possess a wide array of athletic talents. Finish fifth in half a dozen events and no one will remember your name.

OTHER PEOPLE’S HEADS ARE ALL THAT COUNTS

Once you determine the Unique Difference for what you’re selling, you have to make a challenging claim or a great promise to let the marketplace know it exists (i.e., to make it famous), or you’ll be that proverbial tree that falls in a forest that no one hears. Indeed, the difference is only a claim, an invitation for customers to think about the product the way we’d like them to, until we actually perform and deliver as promised. Only then is the difference marked, trusted, and accepted into the customer’s mind.

And the customer’s mind isn’t just the most important thing for your business—it’s the only thing.

Your brand—which is the perception and the belief that you have a meaningful difference—does not come into being when a customer sees your advertising about a difference. It happens when the customer tries your product and experiences delight, relief, or satisfaction—when they feel the racing suspension in the BMW take the curve, get the help they need for a technical problem at 3:00 AM, or walk into the smell of fresh bread in the middle of Grand Central Station at Zaro’s Bread Basket bakery. That’s when your difference takes hold and becomes a brand because it’s superlative, important, believable, measurable and own-able in the customer’s mind.

Anywhere you look you’ll see organizations whose managers go around breathing their own fumes, assuming their DSI is one thing, when going out and talking to customers would reveal that, in their minds, they stand for a different idea altogether. It’s a perilous position for a company to be in. What might be circulating with customers is a dominant un-selling idea. Ever heard Nieman Marcus jokingly referred to as “Needless Mark-up”? Or Whole Foods called “Whole Paycheck”? Both are big, successful brands, but to the customers who pass along these nicknames to their friends via word of mouth, they stand for overpriced merchandise, not glamour or a unique retail value as they might hope. This yawning gap between the DSI they want to own and they one they really have is a problem they need to address it ASAP.

Friends, your big selling difference is in the eye of the beholder. That had better be your customers and your valued teammates and employees. If you want to be UnStoppable, then other people’s heads are all that counts.

You must think about your Unique Difference, what it is that keeps you the number one choice of your customers, every single day. It’s the direct responsibility of the CEO and founders in any successful company. It’s called a Dominant Selling Idea.

1 Based on branding guru Jack Trout’s famous question: “A difference or a slogan?”