Brand Attributes & Prestige Worldwide

Defining what it’s like to do business with you.

When Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly went all entrepreneurial in Step Brothersthey named their new entertainment venture “Prestige Worldwide.” Besides being a good schtick, this fictional start-up nicely lampooned the widespread overuse of (and often unearned) superlatives to define a brand and its business.

The “about” section of many companies’ (particularly B2B) web sites touting the attributes of “being a leader; a leading provider; a global leader; an innovator; a leading innovator; the fastest innovator; the largest; the largest supplier; a dominant supplier; the premier provider; a pioneer; pioneering breakthroughs…” all collide to create serious skepticism about who the real leaders and followers are in any given category.

In addition to commoditizing the very achievement of actually earning leadership, these tired attributes claim outcomes, not staking out the approach, strategy, or culture required for success. Revisiting how you think about brand attributes can be extremely helpful in stepping out of a homogenous overpromising crowd.

In a noisy, unforgivingly transparent world, brand attributes are best thought of as defining “what it is like to do business with you.” When attributes set expectations for advantageous behaviors and human-centered interactions, they transcend thin claims of superiority with a clear shared vision of the future and how to get there together. Thus achieving worldwide prestige.

The death of differentiation

Being important vs. being different

In their 1981 book, Positioning: The Battle for your Mind, Al Ries and Jack Trout describe how “positioning is used as a tool to reach customers in a crowded marketplace.” The utility of positioning gave rise to a slew of requirements against which one can identify high-potential positioning ideas. One of those requirements is whether or not a positioning concept is differentiating; does it leverage what makes a company different than available alternatives?

One Trout and Ries’ premise is that an effective positioning strategy focuses on an “unoccupied niche in the mind of the audience.” Which makes one wonder if being different is really good enough to occupy that elusive niche? Is it possible that being different isn’t always necessarily good? Or relevant? Or any advantage at all?

We know that decision-makers place considered brands in a distinct order relative to one another. And only one brand can be more valuable, more important than other choices. So, if a business desires to move up the hierarchy of preference in a customer’s mind, it must achieve one simple, singular thing; it must be as important as possible – more important than other options. Not simply different.