Differentiation

The reason to choose this and not the one beside it. Sameness is the most expensive mistake a brand can make.

Difference must be real before it is stated. A claim of difference that the product experience contradicts is worse than sameness, because it is remembered as a lie. The durable kinds are structural: a way of working, a refusal, a taste that competitors would have to become different companies to copy.

The audit is unforgiving: put the category's websites side by side and blank out the names. Whatever could be swapped without anyone noticing is not identity, it is category costume. What survives the blanking, in our own case a film's patience applied to everything, is the actual brand.