The Differentiation Temptation

A friend I went skiing with once taught me a lot about the mistakes businesses make when trying to differentiate themselves.

This friend had an unconventional take on her gear choice. While most of us in our group were equipped with relatively modern skis, helmets, parkas, and the rest, hers were easily a decade old. If not much more. When someone asked why she hadn’t bothered to buy anything more up-to-date, her response wasn’t what I expected. “I’m not that great of a skier,” she explained, “and I don’t want to dress like an expert when I’m not one.”

I had to give her some credit, because I knew exactly what she was talking about. Skiers with the opposite approach are easy to spot. Decked out in $1,000 skis and top-of-the-line clothing, they can barely make it down a beginner slope. While they might have all the outward appearances of an expert, those externalities belie reality.

That, I think, is where many of us end up with our businesses.

There’s a temptation to jump straight to the external signs of differentiation, while skipping the work of finding out what actually makes us different.

I’ve seen this story play out twice already this year:

• A global organization I was working with had spent a year building a new brand platform. On the surface, it had all the polish and craft that you’d expect of an enterprise of its size. But despite the 60-page deck that laid out this new brand platform, it was only a thin veneer. Underneath, the organization still didn’t know what it stood for or what made it unique.
• A mid-market team I met recently had spent months trying to reconcile two very different offerings under a new positioning statement. But they weren’t making progress because they hadn’t dug deep enough to understand what those offerings actually had in common. The positioning statement should have been a distillation of that work, not the work itself.

In both situations, the business was focusing on the outward signs of differentiation. Neither was figuring out what actually made it unique (or what it might need to do to become so).

I’ve been struggling to understand why this happens.

It bothers me because more often than not, the teams I meet really do want to do great work, but they get stuck on the surface level.

Here are a few theories I have:

Externalities are easier

I’m going to chalk this up to human nature. It can be a lot more fun to revise the logo, update the website messaging, or name a new category. It feels satisfying (in the moment, anyway) because the change is right there in front of you. But like scrolling one too many YouTube shorts, the thrill wears off quickly when you realize that nothing is different about the business itself. Meanwhile, you can spend a week trying to sort out what makes your business truly differentiated and have nothing to show for it but a headache.

Marketing strategy is being lost as a discipline

I think AI has a partial role to play in this, but it’s not entirely to blame. Marketing has essentially become a tactical function. First it was growth hacking, then GTM engineering, and now it’s agentic marketing. I’m not saying those practices don’t have value. But if marketing’s first job is to shape what the market believes, and no one is experienced in doing that, then perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise if the fundamentals get skipped.

Thinking is becoming undervalued

I don’t have data for this, but I have a strong hunch here, and two anecdotes. The first is that employee surveillance is a thing. At some businesses, screen time and mouse clicks are employee KPIs. Yet how many of your best ideas have hit you while looking at a screen? Second is that it’s so easy to outsource your thinking to AI. The reasons why that’s a terrible idea are a topic for another post, but if the temptation is there, the option will be exercised.

Too many people work on unreasonable constraints

It’s not lost on me that businesses must move quickly. But when you move so fast that you can’t even take stock of what you’re actually doing, you don’t move forward; you go around in circles. My fear is that’s what many leaders are being asked to do now (explicitly or implicitly). It’s much faster to paint the car and ignore what’s under the hood, so that’s what gets worked on.

What’s Hard is Your Opportunity

These theories probably make me sound like a bit of a grump. But I’m actually quite optimistic on this subject. So let me end on a more positive note.

I began by stating that when trying to differentiate, too many businesses jump straight to the external signs of differentiation. They skip the underlying work of discovering what makes their business different in the first place because it requires too much time, too much effort, or they simply don’t know how.

This difficulty, though, is your opportunity.

If all of your competitors refuse to build the scaffolding and only have time for the veneer, then that can work in your favor. While they have “thin differentiation” that crumbles once you poke at it, you can be the business that actually knows what it stands for and has the receipts to prove it. You can be the business that the market actually understands and actually trusts. But only if you’re willing to put in the effort.

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