Difference is Excellence

Brands That Win Don’t Just Communicate

Most brands are asking the wrong questions:

What should we say?
How do we stand out?
How do we get attention?

But attention is cheap and noise is abundant. Relevance is rare.

The real question, the one that separates forgettable brands from the ones we love is: How should our world feel?

Until that question is answered, everything else is just noise. You answer it by colouring in all aspects of the ideal experience, how it looks, smells, and sounds; the design, the goals and non-goals, and the people who would inhabit that place. What’s the culture like, what are the rules, what do you believe in. What. Does. It. All. Mean.

If you can’t answer that, you don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know what journey you’re taking your customers on. You have no idea how you’re making clients feel. You have no clue what people really think about your product or your website, and you also have no idea where you’re going. Because you’re thinking too small, it’s impossible to have an effective communications strategy if you can’t answer this question.

Most people are thinking at the atomic level rather than the world level when it comes to communication and design. They’re paying attention to content and constantly reacting to the shifting context. The best antidote to this is to spend more energy building and owning your own context.

Find Your Difference & Become It

Difference is not just novelty. Difference is not volume. Difference is not aesthetic rebellion for its own sake.

Difference is what makes you inimitable. It’s the source of sustainable competitive advantage, and it comes from knowing thyself.

Once you find it for your brand, you can build your world around it. You can amplify that source of excellence and combine it with the other valuable and rare parts of what your brand is, who your people are, your culture, and you can achieve excellence.

To me, excellence is when you create a system that has so much relevance and resonance that it works and people want to be part of it.

Excellence is coherence so complete it becomes unmistakable. It’s when every detail; visual, emotional, behavioural; points in the same direction creating an irresistible pull. When nothing is accidental. When people don’t just recognize you, they feel you.

Most brands chase relevance by reacting to culture, but the best brands create relevance by making culture.