Strategic differentiation makes all your marketing communications more effective because they hit home, and more efficient because they don’t have to work as hard to stand out from the crowd.

So how are you different? Answering this for the purposes of strategically positioning your brand is not as simple as it might sound. That is a strategic question that needs to be addressed with broad consideration, deep thoughtfulness and the patience required to arrive at answers that will stand the tests of the marketplace.

There are four elements that inform strategic differentiation:

• Authenticity – real in terms of what you’ve got and what you offer
• Distinction – from competitors
• Relevance – to your audiences
• Alignment – with current trends that can serve as the wind in your sales

Think of each of these elements as a vector consisting of both information and emotion. Where these four lines of information and feeling intersect is where your true strategic differentiation lies. The process of identifying and accurately plotting these vectors can be complex but the solutions should be elegantly simple and succinct enough to communicate in today’s ADD marketing environment.

That’s a tall order, which is why we recommend you don’t try this in-house, unless you’re core expertise lies in this area.