Module 2
Brand Differentiation

Brand Differentiation

Without differentiation, you’re selling a commodity and have to compete on price – or your brand will stagnate or die.

But how do you create true brand differentiation?

Some brands are able to create competitive advantages through differentiation, even though their product or service alone is the same as, or possibly inferior to, the majority of the other options available in the marketplace.

Here you’ll learn the nuances of brand differentiation to understand how to uncover the strengths of your brand as part of your brand strategy. After analyzing your strengths, you’ll learn how to communicate them using specific criteria which can turn them into competitive advantages in the mind of your buyer.

Toolkit Modules

Here you’ll focus on how you compare to the other options in the marketplace and your strengths, comparing them to your competition and applying specific criteria to see if they are competitive advantages.

Brand Differentiation - What You'll Determine

  • Your Competitor Profiles
  • The Rating Criteria Most Important to Your Buyer Personas
  • How You Compare in the Competitive Matrix
  • Your Market’s Ability to Delight
  • Your Brand’s Ability to Delight
  • Your Brand’s Strengths
  • Your Brand’s Differentiating Strengths
  • Which Key Criteria Apply to Your Differentiating Strengths
  • Your Current Competitive Advantages to Use for Differentiation
  • Your Potential Competitive Advantages to Use for Differentiation

Tools in Brand Differentiation

  • 47-slide PDF instructions for download
  • Strategy development report template for download and completion
  • 28-minute audio/video instructions presented by Jim Sagar – accessible from your account for 1 year
  • Written transcript for download

Typical Participants for Brand Differentiation

This module asks challenging questions, the answers of which will be differentiating elements of the brand. The marketing team can create these, but core brand stakeholders should sign off. For small brands, these could be the business owner or executive team. For larger companies, these can be brand managers, VPs or general managers.

Time to Complete Brand Differentiation

This is a two to four-hour session to address each element the first time through. You can’t always make core strategic decisions in a compressed timeframe, so you may need to revisit this work over the course of two to three weeks. You can choose to iterate on this module before moving to the next, or come back to it after completing Brand Positioning, Brand Architecture and Brand Audit.