In retail, it’s becoming easier for anyone to start a business, and it’s becoming harder for consumers to tell the difference between an established, reliable retailer and a website that was set up yesterday to steal your credit card information. In B2B, meanwhile, economic pressures are upending long-established relationships, leaving customers to consider their options. The only way to give your customers clarity amid the confusion is to understand what you do best and establish a brand identity that communicates your strengths to the right customers.

Your Unique Selling Point

When you try to appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one. It’s one of those clichés, that are clichés because they’re true. Appealing to everyone means stripping away what makes you unique. Your unique selling point might turn off some customers, but it’s also what will make others fall in love with you and become customers for life. The latter group are the people you want to build your business for. Look at it from the customer’s perspective. When there are so many businesses competing for attention, the customer can find someone offering exactly what they want: the right product with the right kind of service and the right kind of values. You just have to make sure that you’re visible to the customers looking for exactly what you can provide.

Your unique selling point has to be about more than products and features. Features that might be exclusive to you today might be everywhere tomorrow. The same goes for price. There’s always someone with the infrastructure to offer a product for cheaper. Maybe you’ve scooped your competitors in the short term, but the thing that makes you unique has to be something more lasting and more resonant with consumers.

To find your unique selling point, understand the particular needs that your products address. Think about how your products and the way you sell them resonate with your values and your customers’ values. Maybe you value innovation and you’re always developing new products and finding better ways to do things. Maybe what makes you unique is the opposite: you are part of a long tradition of making and selling something in a certain way, and that way rarely changes, or changes slowly and with careful consideration, always putting quality and the customer experience at the forefront of any decision. Those two values—innovation and tradition—will appeal to two different groups of consumers.

Your Unique Offering

Too many businesses don’t think about their product offering and just… make stuff and try to sell the stuff they make. If it sells, they’re happy, but they don’t really have an identity to build from. If it doesn’t sell, they move in a completely different direction and try again. Businesses that find the right customers approach their offering more strategically. To be this kind of business, you have to find the overlap between what customers want and what you can provide. The next step is to consider how to package, position, and market your products in a way that communicates your brand identity and resonates with your ideal customer.

Communicate Your Values

Whether you make them explicit or not, your business will operate according to a set of values. If you make them explicit in a statement of values, you’ll have a set of principles that will guide your business’s interactions with stakeholders and customers. Businesses often worry that strongly held values will turn off certain customers, but in a competitive market, you probably weren’t going to win over those customers, anyway.

Your values will be baked into everything you do, from internal culture to interactions with customers. If your business is a fun place to work, make it part of your identity. If you’re a no-nonsense operation that’s all about doing what’s right for the customer quickly and efficiently, present that vision to the world. Your brand values won’t move the needle for some customers, but for others, you’ll be exactly what they’ve always needed.

Find Your Brand Voice

It’s one thing to know who you are. It’s another to be able to communicate your brand identity in a way that resonates with your audience. For a message to be emotionally resonant, it has to be authentic. For a particular style of communication to become your “brand voice,” it has to be consistent across all platforms and interactions. If your sales team and customer service reps are always warm and welcoming with your customers in order to create a family atmosphere, for instance, carry that over to your marketing emails, your web copy, and your social media posts.

Your brand voice communicates your unique selling point, your product offering, and your values in words. Your brand image does the same through visual aesthetics. This is where graphic design comes in. Logos, colors, typefaces, and stock photos all have to be carefully considered to convey a unified message. Design choices are about connecting with customers, not personal preference or self-expression.

Tell Authentic Stories

When you develop an identity, you create a story about yourself. A story doesn’t encompass everything that happens in someone’s life. Stories have an angle and an arc, a doorway through which the audience enters and a path the audience follows to a conclusion. Your brand identity is a story you tell to customers, with the details chosen to elicit a certain response, but it has to be a story that rings true. Bad stories feel contrived. The sequence of events doesn’t feel believable, or the story feels over-engineered to produce a predetermined outcome or emotional response. The story you tell about yourself to customers can’t be contrived—another reason to be thoroughly acquainted with your unique selling point and your ideal customer.

There are benefits to telling your brand story beyond more focused and resonant marketing. When you work out these details, you’re also discovering things about your business along the way. When your brand identity begins with strategy, you’re not just telling a clear and comprehensible story to your customers; you’re identifying the things you excel at so you can grow your business by playing to your strengths.  

Know Thyself

The phrase “know thyself” was one of a number of cryptic inscriptions found in the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. It probably meant something like, “know your place in the world” or “understand what you are capable of.” Even then, the world was a vast and confusing place, and understanding who you are, what you want, and what you are capable of is as good a starting point as any if you want to make a difference in the world.  

In a competitive market, it’s harder to make a difference or make yourself known. You’ve got to know exactly who you are, what you can do, and who you can do it for so that you can communicate what makes you special to the customers who are looking for exactly what your business offers. You can’t win over every single customer, and that’s fine. You just need the right customers.

In retail, it’s becoming easier for anyone to start a business, and it’s becoming harder for consumers to tell the difference between an established, reliable retailer and a website that was set up yesterday to steal your credit card information. In B2B, meanwhile, economic pressures are upending long-established relationships, leaving customers to consider their options. The only way to give your customers clarity amid the confusion is to understand what you do best and establish a brand identity that communicates your strengths to the right customers.

Your Unique Selling Point

When you try to appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one. It’s one of those clichés, that are clichés because they’re true. Appealing to everyone means stripping away what makes you unique. Your unique selling point might turn off some customers, but it’s also what will make others fall in love with you and become customers for life. The latter group are the people you want to build your business for. Look at it from the customer’s perspective. When there are so many businesses competing for attention, the customer can find someone offering exactly what they want: the right product with the right kind of service and the right kind of values. You just have to make sure that you’re visible to the customers looking for exactly what you can provide.

Your unique selling point has to be about more than products and features. Features that might be exclusive to you today might be everywhere tomorrow. The same goes for price. There’s always someone with the infrastructure to offer a product for cheaper. Maybe you’ve scooped your competitors in the short term, but the thing that makes you unique has to be something more lasting and more resonant with consumers.

To find your unique selling point, understand the particular needs that your products address. Think about how your products and the way you sell them resonate with your values and your customers’ values. Maybe you value innovation and you’re always developing new products and finding better ways to do things. Maybe what makes you unique is the opposite: you are part of a long tradition of making and selling something in a certain way, and that way rarely changes, or changes slowly and with careful consideration, always putting quality and the customer experience at the forefront of any decision. Those two values—innovation and tradition—will appeal to two different groups of consumers.

Your Unique Offering

Too many businesses don’t think about their product offering and just… make stuff and try to sell the stuff they make. If it sells, they’re happy, but they don’t really have an identity to build from. If it doesn’t sell, they move in a completely different direction and try again. Businesses that find the right customers approach their offering more strategically. To be this kind of business, you have to find the overlap between what customers want and what you can provide. The next step is to consider how to package, position, and market your products in a way that communicates your brand identity and resonates with your ideal customer.

Communicate Your Values

Whether you make them explicit or not, your business will operate according to a set of values. If you make them explicit in a statement of values, you’ll have a set of principles that will guide your business’s interactions with stakeholders and customers. Businesses often worry that strongly held values will turn off certain customers, but in a competitive market, you probably weren’t going to win over those customers, anyway.

Your values will be baked into everything you do, from internal culture to interactions with customers. If your business is a fun place to work, make it part of your identity. If you’re a no-nonsense operation that’s all about doing what’s right for the customer quickly and efficiently, present that vision to the world. Your brand values won’t move the needle for some customers, but for others, you’ll be exactly what they’ve always needed.

Find Your Brand Voice

It’s one thing to know who you are. It’s another to be able to communicate your brand identity in a way that resonates with your audience. For a message to be emotionally resonant, it has to be authentic. For a particular style of communication to become your “brand voice,” it has to be consistent across all platforms and interactions. If your sales team and customer service reps are always warm and welcoming with your customers in order to create a family atmosphere, for instance, carry that over to your marketing emails, your web copy, and your social media posts.

Your brand voice communicates your unique selling point, your product offering, and your values in words. Your brand image does the same through visual aesthetics. This is where graphic design comes in. Logos, colors, typefaces, and stock photos all have to be carefully considered to convey a unified message. Design choices are about connecting with customers, not personal preference or self-expression.

Tell Authentic Stories

When you develop an identity, you create a story about yourself. A story doesn’t encompass everything that happens in someone’s life. Stories have an angle and an arc, a doorway through which the audience enters and a path the audience follows to a conclusion. Your brand identity is a story you tell to customers, with the details chosen to elicit a certain response, but it has to be a story that rings true. Bad stories feel contrived. The sequence of events doesn’t feel believable, or the story feels over-engineered to produce a predetermined outcome or emotional response. The story you tell about yourself to customers can’t be contrived—another reason to be thoroughly acquainted with your unique selling point and your ideal customer.

There are benefits to telling your brand story beyond more focused and resonant marketing. When you work out these details, you’re also discovering things about your business along the way. When your brand identity begins with strategy, you’re not just telling a clear and comprehensible story to your customers; you’re identifying the things you excel at so you can grow your business by playing to your strengths.  

Know Thyself

The phrase “know thyself” was one of a number of cryptic inscriptions found in the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. It probably meant something like, “know your place in the world” or “understand what you are capable of.” Even then, the world was a vast and confusing place, and understanding who you are, what you want, and what you are capable of is as good a starting point as any if you want to make a difference in the world.  

In a competitive market, it’s harder to make a difference or make yourself known. You’ve got to know exactly who you are, what you can do, and who you can do it for so that you can communicate what makes you special to the customers who are looking for exactly what your business offers. You can’t win over every single customer, and that’s fine. You just need the right customers.