When I look back at some of my older writing I often cringe at just how serious I was about business.
âYour writing and emails need to add value or no one will read themâ. âYour website has to look professional so clients take you seriouslyâ. And all that âdress one step above your clientsâ malarky I must have heard somewhere.
Sheesh.
Perhaps itâs age, but Iâm much more open to the frivolous and fun in business now. Lord knows we need something to laugh about these days.
Take differentiation for example.
I used to believe that differentation was only valuable if it was âmeaningfulâ. If the ways you were different to your competitor were useful to your clients in some way.
âAn accountant who wears a clown suit is differentâ I used to say, âbut I donât think itâs going to help him get hiredâ.
I suspect I might have been wrong.
Because while having some form of meaningful differentiation is crucial - especially for high value products and servicesâŠ
âŠâmeaningless differentiationâ can be valuable too.
For example, if I look at my emails, theyâre meaningfully different because I share different ideas to anyone else and I use different personal examples and stories to illustrate them.
Those unique ideas are how my readers get value from my writing. The stories make the writing interesting and build credibility because they show I have experience applying those ideas in the real wold.
But the other way my emails are different is the graphics.
The silly cartoon figures and the little arrows and lines and scribbles.
Thereâs nothing particularly meaningful in them. They donât add value other than hopefully making you smile. They donât build up my credibility in any way.
But they do get asked about more than anything else in my emails.
People remember them.
It would be great if whenever one of my readers decided they needed a course or support to write better email newsletters they immediately thought âthat Ian Brodie has shared some amazingly valuable yet practical insights about email newsletters - we should definitely buy his course to up our gameâ.
But I suspect their thinking goes rather more along the lines of âthat guy with the funny cartoons in his emails does a course on newsletters doesnât he? We should take a look to see what itâs likeâŠIan Brodie or something I think heâs calledâ.
The âmeaningless differentiationâ of my cartoons and scribbles get me remembered.
Ideally, that helps them recall the value and insights in my emails. But if not, remembering me is a decent enough start because they can see the value and insight by coming to my site.
And if they donât remember me? Well, it doesnât matter how meaningfylly different I am, it never enters anyoneâs thoughts.
So weird as it seems, sometimes differentiation that has no real meaning can actually be the most important thing you do if it can grab attention and make sure potential clients remember you.
If you think of how you differentiate yourself: how much of it is the rational meaningful differentiation that aims to set you apart from your competitors in a way your clients will value?
And how much of it is simply to get their attention and to get them to remember you?
Because if you donât have the latter, the former never comes into play.
Serious young Ian didnât realise this.
Frivolous old Ian does.
- Ian