The Distinction Identifier™

Anyone in the marketing world wants to talk about “what makes you different.” The challenge is that pursuing difference, if not done carefully, can approach looking silly, useless or just irrelevant. Someone standing on their head is different, but that doesn’t make them compelling.

The reality is that people have a built-in desire for connection, and the way that relationships work (and the brain for that matter) is that we tend to seek out sameness, or similarity. We also attune to genuineness.

So the real question isn’t “what makes you different?” A better question is “What is it about you and your firm that genuinely shows up and is relevant to your audience?”  Of course, to answer this requires a few things. You need to be clear on your personal brand (and how that shows up in the firm); you have to know who your niche market is (with precision), and then (only then) can you craft a core message that links them. Those three elements make up The Distinction Identifier™.

How do we do it?  Here is an overview.

Personal Brand Interview
The Personal Brand Interview is a detailed and deep interview that is conducted to find key driving themes in your life and extract them so that they can be distilled into a Personal Brand Statement. We don’t share much about how we do this interview because we don’t want to taint the process. However, the result of it is a clear statement of, essentially, how you do life.

Ideal Client Identifier™ and Niche Finder™
Our next step is to complete an in-depth assessment of four groups of clients:

  • Your Top 20 Clients
  • Your Favourite 20 Clients
  • Your Fastest Growing Clients
  • The 20 Clients who have been with you the Longest

This assessment gives us incredible insight into the clients with whom you are the most successful and allows us to help you clearly identify them.

With this, we then use our Niche Finder™ process to name a findable, actionable niche market that meets a series of 8 success criteria. This niche is critical to giving you a place to focus your marketing efforts.

Core Message
Our final stage is to craft a simple, direct core message that reflects your brand and will be relevant to your niche. This will be the message that is integrated into every element of your relationship marketing program.