How to Test Your Brand Difference: Find Your Brownie Factor

Business owners, are you struggling to differentiate your brand from your competitors?

Here's a quick test. Ask yourself: what sets you apart? Take some time to think about it. Really think. Don't reach for the first answer.

The red flag answer

If your answer is the quality of your product or service, it might be a red flag.

Quality is like vanilla ice cream. Universally loved, widely available, and pairs well with a lot of different flavors. Everyone claims it, customers expect it, and it gives nobody a reason to choose you over the business down the street claiming the exact same thing.

Quality is the entry fee. It gets you into the game. It was never going to be the reason you win it.

Ask a room of owners what sets them apart and most will say some version of quality or service. If your difference is your industry's most common sentence, it isn't a difference. It's background noise.

Find your brownie factor

But what if you add a warm, gooey dark chocolate brownie to that vanilla ice cream? Now it's a different dessert. Now it's yours.

That's what sets your brand apart. Figure out your brownie factor, whether it's visual, thematic, cause related, or niche focused. It makes it harder for competitors to replicate and easier for you to stand out, because copying a genuine trait looks fake on anyone else.

Notice the brownie isn't a slogan. It's a real thing about the business that customers can see, taste, or point at. If yours only exists in your tagline, it doesn't exist yet.

The one sentence test

Say your difference out loud, in one sentence. And the words quality, service, and experience are banned. Everybody says them. They don't count.

If the sentence takes more than a breath, you haven't found it yet.

Now do the swap. Could your closest competitor say the exact same sentence and have it be true? If yes, it isn't a difference. It's a description of your industry.

Write yours down. Put it where you'll see it. Every brand decision after that gets one question: does this make the brownie more obvious, or less?

Where to look for it

• Visual: a look, a style, or a signature element nobody else in your market owns. Ask: could a customer pick your truck, your sign, your post out of a lineup with the name covered?
• Thematic: a theme or world your brand consistently lives in. Ask: is there a world your customers already love that your brand can honestly live in?
• Cause related: something you genuinely stand for and act on. Ask: what do you already do without posting about it? That's usually the real one.
• Niche focused: a specific audience you serve better than generalists can. Ask: who do you serve better than anybody because you're one of them, or you were?

And once you find it, protect it. Owners water their difference down because it feels safer to appeal to everybody. That's how the brownie ends up back as plain vanilla.

Your difference then needs positioning and language to carry it, which is the subject of brand positioning and how to stand out, and a brand identity that makes it visible everywhere.

Not sure where your brand is leaking? Take the free brand audit quiz first, then talk to us if you want a hand fixing it.