Stop trying to be different, start being distinctive
Updated: Aug 27
If you are in Marketing, you've probably spent a decent amount of your career trying to answer "What makes us different?" But it's the wrong question, and it's costing teams more than they realize.
Byron Sharp's research at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute — built on decades of data across hundreds of categories — draws a distinction that most marketers were never taught, but that changes how you build a brand once you understand it: Differentiation and distinctiveness are not the same thing, and only one of them actually drives growth.
Differentiation is about being meaningfully better than the competition
A unique feature, a sharper value proposition, a positioning statement that separates you from everyone else in the category. Most brand strategy work is oriented around this, and most marketing teams spend enormous time and energy trying to answer it well.
Distinctiveness is about being instantly recognizable
The colors, the voice, the story structure, the visual codes that make a buyer think of you before they've done any comparison at all. It's the recognition that fires the moment their eye moves across the ad, the shelf, the search result, the LinkedIn feed.
Buyers rarely spend enough time with your brand to register "different." They spend enough time to register "familiar."
Familiar is what gets recalled when a buying moment comes. I saw this play out at scale in payments. We weren't just competing with other banks and fintechs. We were competing for memory in a category with a lot of noise and long sales cycles. In the moment a CFO or Treasurer thought "who do I call?", we needed to already be the answer.
Once we stopped chasing product-level differentiators and started building for consistent memory, our campaigns began to compound. The story stayed the same across every touchpoint. The visual language stayed consistent across every channel. And the results reflected it.
The uncomfortable truth for most brands is that they're actively working against their own distinctiveness.
They rebrand when they should be reinforcing. They chase feature differentiation when they should be investing in memory. They change strategy every quarter and wonder why nothing seems to stick.
B2B especially is a long game. If your brand changes its mind every quarter, you lose whatever memory you've just spent budget building. Customers are quick to forget, and the next brand quietly takes the place you had.
Distinctiveness isn't about being loud or weird. It's about being consistent, creative and present enough that buyers can find you in their memory when it matters.
The question isn't what makes you different. It's what buyers will remember you by, and whether you're still doing that same thing a year from now.
Research reference: Sharp, B. (2010). How Brands Grow. Oxford University Press / Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Romaniuk, J. & Sharp, B. (2016). How Brands Grow: Part 2. Oxford University Press / Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.
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