9 Brands That Employ Excellent Differentiation Strategies
Brands are verbs, what they do matters much more than what they say. So it is no surprise that we do a lot of research on brands that employ excellent differentiation strategies.
Today’s winning brands aren’t playing it safe. They never say “that’s how we’ve always done it”. They know their brands are more than just a sleek logo or a cool website.
Here is an excellent short video to refresh the topic for you:
The brands that crush their competition are those whose understanding that strategic differentiation goes much deeper. They go deeper than pretty visuals and responsive code. Differentiated branding is layered, sculpted, and tested.
To create a layered, brilliant, and competition-killing brand, three things must align.
Understanding and differentiating from your competition
Combined, these elements create brand magic.
Marketing, at its best, is about the future. Unfortunately, we spend most of our time stuck in the past. We research what already happened and extrapolate forward to produce a plan. It’s not that we’re lazy, we simply know a whole lot more about the past than the present or the future.
We already know that marketing is becoming more social, local, and mobile, just as we know that big data and new interfaces such as touch, voice, and gesture are becoming increasingly more important. What comes next?
To see these three things in action, keep on reading.
Below I’ve highlighted some brilliant companies that our research shows are great at differentiating themselves from their competition.
Differentiation strategy … Lego
It may seem now like a foregone conclusion that The Lego Movie would be a huge hit, but anyone who’s seen a great book, comic or toy turns into a terrible movie knows better.
Before this, the sentence “It was a 90-minute infomercial and it was awesome” could never have been written. But the marketing for the movie was a master class in branded content. It helped it become a global hit, with elaborate the behind-the-scenes videos and teasers.
Dove conducted a study and “found that three-quarters of dads say they are responsible for their child’s emotional well-being. On the flip side, only 20 percent of dads see this role reflected in media.”
These findings provided a backbone for its Dove Men+Care #RealStrength campaign that features dads as important parts of their children’s lives.
Creating a viral megahit twice with the same brand isn’t easy. However, Unilever has shown it can happen with Dove—albeit with plenty of work and strategy.
Unilever had its first monster hit in the Dove “Real Beauty” campaign with “Evolution” in 2005 from Ogilvy & Mather, Toronto.
Nearly eight years later, “Real Beauty Sketches” from Ogilvy Brazil took less than a month to eclipse the reach and impact of its predecessor.
Another great example of user-generated content, Starbucks’ White Cup Contest launched in April 2014.
Here customers across the country were asked to doodle on their Starbucks cups and submit pictures as entries. The winning entry would be the template for a new limited edition Starbucks cup.
Nearly 4,000 customers submitted entries in a three-week span. The contest was a great way for Starbucks to earn publicity and prove that it strongly valued customer feedback.
In addition, Starbucks’ new “#sipface” campaign has made a huge splash in the Instagram world. Launched to promote the new Frappuccino Happy Hour menu.
The campaign encouraged fans to post creative pictures of their “#sipface” on Instagram which were curated and displayed on Frappuccino.com.
Starbucks has been ranked the “fifth-largest brand on Facebook with 34 million fans,” and has over 3.6 million followers on Twitter.
Effective Differentiation … Tourism Queensland
In its quest to find new ways to draw tourists to the Queensland Islands, Tourism Queensland launched its “Best Job in the World” promotion, which proved to be a remarkably effective campaign.
Over 34,000 people from over 200 countries submitted videos to win a six-month caretaker job that paid $150,000 AUD in one of the most beautiful tourist destinations in the world, while countless others enhanced their understanding of Queensland as a vacation option.
To help boost top-of-mind awareness, Coca-Cola created the “Share a Coke” campaign. In this campaign, the company produced Coke bottles with customers’ names on the labels.
They handed them out throughout different cities, in order to increase its exposure on Twitter. Customers were then asked to share the pictures of their personalized coke bottle on Twitter and other social media platforms.
Coca-Cola first launched the campaign in Australia but expanded it to the United States, the United Kingdom, and other regions across the world.
Effective Differentiation … hole Foods
Whole Foods goes beyond being a grocery store, doesn’t it? They’re also content generators and thought leaders.
They use their site to offer a whole new experience for customers offline and online.
While many brands only share content they themselves create, Whole Foods and its Dark Rye Magazine do an impressive job of establishing engagement by reposting a plethora of material from followers.
This has allowed Dark Rye to go beyond the mundane recipe guide to become a blog designed with the clear goal of sharing inspirational works of art. This is true whether they feature food or not.
Competitive differentiation examples … WestJet
Corporate philanthropy can do true good in the world. It can more than pay for itself when done right.
WestJet’s “Christmas Miracle” video proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt.
There is also little doubt that the video went a long way toward building and developing employee morale.
This is another element to creating a successful brand that more companies should give some attention to.
Anyone unsure of the true success of this video should know that a 2014 version was created. This time, WestJet brought Christmas joy to the underprivileged in the Dominican Republic.
By leveraging enough of what worked for the company last year and adding new twists, it continues to draw viewers, grow its brand, and actually do something good for someone else.
Effective business differentiation … Ben and Jerry’s
Ben & Jerry’s uses its ice cream products creatively to express their core values around giving back to society. Their cause is Ben & Jerry’s Foundation.
The Mission of this Foundation is to make the world a better place. They do this by empowering Ben & Jerry’s employees to use available resources to support and encourage outside organizations that are doing good work.
This work includes efforts towards eliminating the underlying causes of environmental and social problems.
Awesomeness is the way we describe Zillow’s differentiation.
They are unlike any other realty brand in the marketplace. Their marketing is simple and genuine emotion.
The bottom line
“The value of an idea lies in the using of it.”
Do you have an idea that will change the world? Well, it’s not worth anything unless you can turn that idea into a reality. So take the plunge and see just how far that idea can take you. Or, you can sit around trading advice over the internet.
Both the power of persuasion and excellence is certainly important to successful differentiation, aren’t they?
These companies certainly have figured this out. Simple, yet interesting. Not selling. What do you think?
Need some help in capturing more customers with your value propositions? Creative ideas to help the differentiation from your competitors?
The choice is yours.
Excellent differentiation strategies.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on brands and branding from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
