Nobody is that different.
I've started asking customers why they picked the place they picked. Not owners. Customers. The answers are so boring they should worry every business I've ever worked with. Nobody mentions anything that makes the place different. They say it was close. They say somebody answered the phone. They say a friend went there. They say there was an appointment on a Thursday and the other place couldn't see them for a week.
Because when I actually ask customers why they chose somewhere, almost nobody says anything about differentiation.
They say it was close. They say somebody answered the phone. They say a friend went there. They say the appointment was available on a Thursday and the other place couldn't see them until the following week.
None of that's positioning. All of it's availability, proximity, and somebody vouching.
Which points at something uncomfortable about the whole exercise. Differentiation assumes the customer is comparing. Standing between two options, weighing them, choosing the better one. That's a real situation and it does happen. It's just much rarer than the strategy deck assumes.
Most of the time the customer isn't choosing between you and a competitor. They're choosing between doing this thing and continuing not to.
The objection is fair and I want to give it room, because in some categories differentiation is the entire game.
If forty businesses do the same thing on the same street and the customer can see all of them at once, being distinguishable is survival. Anything sold on a screen next to its rivals is in that world. So is anything a customer buys often enough to have opinions about.
But that isn't the shape of most local service businesses. A person needing what you do isn't looking at forty options. They're looking at three, they know one of them by name, and mostly they're looking at their own calendar wondering whether to bother this month.
What bothers me about differentiation as a habit isn't that it's wrong. It's what it costs while you do it.
The effort goes into the top of the funnel and into language. New words for the same service. A refreshed set of values. A repositioning that takes four months and changes nothing anyone outside the building can detect.
Meanwhile the phone rings out at lunchtime because everyone is at lunch. The first available appointment is eleven days away and nobody has asked whether that's normal. The person who came in twice last spring hasn't heard anything since. The website form lands in an inbox somebody checks on Mondays. The voicemail still gives the old hours. None of those are brand problems. Every one of them is a reason somebody went elsewhere, or nowhere, and not a single one will surface in a positioning exercise.
I should admit the shape of my own bias here. I've sat through a lot of bad brand work and it's possible I'm reacting to the bad version rather than the idea. Real positioning, done properly, changes what a business charges and who it attracts, and I've watched that work.
What I would say is that it's almost never the first thing wrong, and it's almost always the first thing addressed, because it's more pleasant to talk about who you're than to look at how long the phone rings.