Reilly Newman | Business is limiting because business is limited.
In order to compete, businesses strive to be faster, cheaper, or offer the new and dazzling. To stand out, they may adjust their business model or completely flip it on its head. In an extreme case, this is what Netflix did to movie rentals with mailing DVDs to streaming movies online or what Sprinkles did to cupcakes with their cupcake ATMs. In this tech-driven world, we see it quite often because technology has enabled businesses to apply new, shiny tactics to their model. It’s eye-catching and interesting, but can only differentiate your business so much.
This is because it will only be a matter of time until either your competition does the same, it becomes the market norm, or technology passes you up just as it did to BlockBuster. Yes, businesses should stay on top of new technologies and advances in their marketspace. Yes, they should definitely experiment with these and try new ways of doing business. That’s great, but by no means should you depend on these as your ace in the hole. A business model tactical change can only differentiate your business so much and for so long. True difference is derived from brand.
As these gimmicks may be great ways to get awareness or get your name out there, they are tactics that will eventually commandeer the brand – reducing their business to just that. It’s good, but not great as the business is now trapped as “that one business that does that one thing”. This obviously becomes a problem when another business starts doing that thing too. Then another. And another…
As we’ve covered before, brand is the audience’s perception of your business. Beyond the menu of faster, cheaper, or whatever your business offers, brand opens up more opportunities to sustainably differentiate your business. (I say sustainably because “faster, cheaper, etc.” is not sustainable for most businesses.) Since brand is based on perception, it allows you to break into realms of perceived value. This is how a luxury brand becomes premium and an experiential lifestyle brand becomes just that.
The brand empowers them to enter these realms based on the signals it allows the business to portray.
By sheer difficulty, the challenge of accomplishing this as a business makes it naturally a uniqueness factor. That also makes it harder to copy. The perception of the brand being of higher quality, more expertise, more expensive, better suited, etc. are all subjective advantages the business can now lean into. When left alone, the business is unable to climb higher in its perceived value because the “brand” is completely based on just the business and nothing more. This limits the business quickly as it finds the glass ceiling the market has determined for the sector.
Brand makes all the difference as it allows the business to tap into perceived value…to go beyond the glass ceiling of business and enjoy the limitless boundaries of true perception.
