Make Your Brand Stand Out, Fight Sameness, & Be Genuinely Different

The Problem of Marketing Sameness

Louis: So you have a way to this world, sameness is something that is. I haven’t really heard that many people mention the problem this way before, so let’s talk about that first. How do you define sameness in your mind? Like what does it mean actually?

Peep Laja: Well, sameness is the combined effect of, of brands or companies being too similar in their offers, poorly differentiated in their branding and, and also indistinct in their communication, meaning that they say the exact same things. We are the easiest email marketing software. And also being the exact same. Most companies out there, overwhelming majority, 99.7%, use vanilla language. Their products and services are pretty much like any other companies are fungible. You can just replace one company easily with another. And their marketing messages are near identical to that of their competition. So I mean, if you visit websites of competing companies, you’ll find that they really offer no meaningful differentiation. In fact, the value proposition, the way they, they phrase what they do or you know, the value they add, it’s crafted from the point of view that they’re the only one doing what they do. It’s ridiculous. And then there are popular books out there also, like Story Brand. I hate that book. It teaches people to say what you do. And it doesn’t even mention once that there might be other chiropractors in the town you operate in, you know?

Louis: Yeah, I’ve heard you talking about this book before. Okay, so it’s about basically saying the same thing, having the same offer, having the same design, having you can basically replace the logo with someone else and

Peep Laja: it’s going to be exactly right. The only difference between most companies is the logo, really, you know, the colors.

Louis: Okay, so why is that?

Why Companies Become Identical Over Time

Peep Laja: Well, two Reasons or multiple reasons. One is that the times when you see companies that are truly different is when there is some innovation happening. It’s a new thing, it’s a new category. Tesla is making electric cars with long lasting batteries. They’re an innovator, the only one doing what they’re doing. For now, as the electric car category gets more mature, you know, five years from now, every single carmaker will have electric cars with as good or better electric batteries. So what I’m saying is that over time as categories mature, competitors become more and more similar to each other. You know, my favorite example is hotels. A very mature category. In almost every single hotel you get lotion, you get soap, you get shampoo included, but not toothpaste, not toothbrushes, even like water you mostly have to pay for. Still, like why they change your sheets every single day? Why is that the default in every single hotel? You know, like why is not choice the default? So it’s because everybody’s looking at what the competition is doing. And so in software. Oh, the feature, the competitor released that feature, we’re going to build that feature too. So everybody has feature parity, you know, so yeah, so that, that is the main reason and in terms of the language people use, why the language is vanilla, is that I think being different is, is scary. You don’t want to alienate somebody. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s easier to be inoffensive, you know, and it’s, it’s also really tempting to be a safe and boring company. You know, you do your safe and boring marketing and you post safe and boring advertising because if you’re inoffensive, you are beyond criticism. You don’t stand out, but also won’t get hit, you won’t get fired for running a campaign that might piss somebody else off because nobody will call you out because you are just like everyone else. You know, obviously the problem is that nobody will also care.

Louis: So the, the, the counter argument to that to say, you know, every hotel does this, does the same thing is, is that people expect it, therefore you must offer it. Everyone expect their shit to be changed every day in the hotel. Everyone expect like soap and shampoo, all of that. So how do you then, like, what’s the answer to that conundrum in a sense, like you want to be, you understand that you need to be different. How do you do it?

Peep Laja: Sure. So what you’re saying, what you’re talking about here is table stakes. Yes, you have to do that if they expect that. But then if you just added the damn free toothpaste, you, you would already be different in one way. Because differentiation, it can be one strong thing, but it also can be a combination of a lot of things. So you need to deliver on the table stakes. If you have an email marketing software, they expect the email marketing software to track this and have these features. So you need all those features. Absolutely. But then you need to go beyond that.

Louis: So table stake features, as you said, that’s what people expect, right? You go to a hotel, you expect your sheets to be changed every day, shampoo to be given, all of that. And in this world of sameness where everyone is copying each other, what do you think are the consequences of that? So before we dive into how to actually be different, let’s talk more about what are the consequences of the problems of that sameness. What could happen to your company or to your freelance business or whatever else if you just do table stack stuff?

The Consequences of Being Like Everyone Else

Peep Laja: Well, if you are already well known, especially if you are already the category leader, you are the mail chimp of email marketing, then differentiation doesn’t matter that much. You know, like if you look at Nike shoes, they’re not really different from Adidas or New Balance, while it’s pretty much the same stuff. So it’s not a problem if you’re already well known, people know you, and then now you’re competing on brand, which is also part of differentiation. But if you are an upstart, if you’re entering a crowded market, and for instance, if you look at the. Scott Brinker maintains the Martech landscape. And in 2019, it was more than 7,000 tools in marketing technology alone. This is, you know, of course it has multiple subcategories, but like it’s still like a, you know, a niche or a thing. So.

Louis: And excluding countries as well, sorry to cut you, but like this Martech landscape excludes any specific software company or technology from specific country, let’s say a French email marketing software, it doesn’t include it. So it’s really the tip of the iceberg, right?

Peep Laja: And so now if you’re building your new startup or you have had it for a while, but you know, you know, you’re still small, maybe you just made it past 1 million in revenue or 2 million, which is still a very small company. Then how, how do you get yourself known if you are like everyone else? It’s very hard to get into the, onto the radar because nobody talks about you, because you’re like, you have nothing about. Let’s take a B testing category. You Know we have market leaders like Optimizely and you know, people know vwo, but the category is inundated with tools. You know, there’s your, your fresh marketer convert.com site gainer. You know, you name it, you name it. It is like 2020 tools and probably another 20 I’ve never heard of. Why? Because they are exactly the same. They do the exact same thing and they, they, they have little tiny feature differences, you know, like, and I’m a category connoisseur in the a B testing tool category. So I care about some minor differences between the tools for, for a layperson, you know, your average marketer for them it’s all, all the same. So basically the problem of being like everybody else is that you will not break through, you will not own the category, you will not grow. Because if you’re an unknown company and you’re exactly like those other companies, like why choose you, I mean price as an upstart? Often companies come with a cheaper price, but that’s not a sustainable competitive advantage because like if you don’t have a long term structural advantage, you know, you can’t keep that as your competitive base because there will be always somebody else coming. Eventually that will be cheaper. And as you grow, your costs get higher. You need to go up market eventually. So basically it’s like if you want to grow and be known and generate word of mouth, you need to be different. You need to give people a reason to talk about you, like be a purple cow, as seth Godin said 20 years ago.

Louis: So the consequences of being the same is really likelihood that you either gonna like not grow as much as you think or die slowly, like of a very slow death. And as you said, there’s a few differentiators that are not really differentiators. As you said, being cheaper works for a certain time if you’re not able to sustain this advantage structurally. So from your organization point of view, maybe you have a unique advantage of like a supplier or maybe you make your own product 10x cheaper than the rest and they haven’t figured out how to do it unless you have a very solid IP behind it. A structural advantage being cheap is never going to last and others can achieve the same. So what other differentiators are actually not differentiators? So apart from price, what are the other ways people think of being different that are actually not worth the investment?

Differentiators That Don’t Actually Work

Peep Laja: Features. So you have this feature and you know the competitor doesn’t have because they will have that feature eventually. There can be a major innovation that you can be known for and you brand yourself as the innovator in this field, which is a little different. But if it’s just that, hey, we have more integrations than this other guy or we have this other feature too, again, this is not a sustainable competitive advantage because everybody will have that feature eventually, especially if it’s a feature users care about.

Louis: Okay, so I think we’ve painted the picture quite well in terms of, you know, in simple terms why you shouldn’t really be striving for to being the same and why you should differentiate yourself. Now to be honest, what I’m very eager to hear from you because I haven’t talked to you about this yet and I haven’t seen you going into that much details yet is how do you actually differentiate. Differentiate yourself and I suspect you probably have some examples from CXN Institute and the way you thought about creating something that is quite different. But you don’t have to use that as an example. You can use something else if you wish. But you know, think about the people listening to this episode right now. They buy into your idea, they buy into. They buy into what we’re saying. But they might struggle to say, okay, that’s all well and good, I can’t compete on price.

Peep Laja: No.

Louis: On features, at least not for the long term. How am I supposed to do this? So what would you tell them? Where would you start?

How CXL Institute Positioned Against Giants

Peep Laja: I want to preface everything I’m about to say with the art and the science of differentiation is something that I am a student of myself. I’m still figuring it out also in fact, I don’t think anybody has figured it out really well, which makes this field very interesting. What was fascinating when I embarked on this journey to learn more about differentiation and sameness and so on, you know, first step is read all the books on this topic and lo and behold, I go to Amazon.com, i expect there to be 57 books about it. There are like three. This topic is so under researched it’s ridiculous. There are like old classic books like Differentiate or Die, which is from year 2000. A lot has changed. This is before the software era. This is before the Internet even was like mainstream. I mean it was there obviously. Or there’s a. There’s a book called different, which is from 2011, which is more like musings about brand differentiation. And that’s about it, I think. There are books that lightly touch upon it and then there are books that are related positioning books. Positioning and differentiation are very over strong. There’s strong overlap also on positioning, there are like two books in the world that have been written by it. One is called positioning from 1981 and then the recent April Dunford’s obviously awesome. So that’s, you know, just as a context and also category creation is, is heavily related to it because the idea of category creation is that two steps back, 1980s, Jack Welch was the CEO of General Electric. And General Electric was in every business. You can imagine thousands of categories. Jack said every category that we’re in where we cannot be number one or two or have a good chance of becoming one or two, we should get out. And they did. There’s a book and all this success case studies about it. The underlying philosophy is that if you cannot be a number one, two or have a good chance of becoming one of those in a particular category, you should create your own. So category creation is another form of differentiation. We can talk about that. Two books that I can mention is one is called Play Bigger and the other one is called category creation which is the customer success was the customer success company Gainsay people wrote that, that book. So this is the stuff that I’ve been working on with and then I’ll be reading all this other stuff and just daily spending a lot of time thinking about it and also using my own situation. So CXL Institute training space and we are focused in that on training Data driven marketers is also a very competitive field. You know, it’s one of the. It’s a market where the barrier of entry is extremely low. Any idiot can build a course and sell it and they do. And it’s heavy and super crowded. It’s maybe not as mature as some other markets, but there are some big players in there. And of course it’s also fragmented. Like Code Academy teaches coders people and then there’s LinkedIn learning that teaches you everything. And there’s Udemy who where you know, anybody can put up a course from how to catch a squirrel to how to write coding R. You know, so lots of various things out there. So my question when I embarked on this journey was, well, why should somebody choose Sigs Institute? And this is the question differentiation should ask. Knowing about all the options out there. Why should I go with you? That’s fundamentally what we’re dealing with here. It’s about making people choose you. It’s not about marketing getting the word out there. It’s about giving people the reason to choose. You know, it starts with positioning in my mind where the positioning in the sense of like what for what kind of people Are you the best choice? What is the use case for buying you and for what kind of people? And so that’s how you define like a position in the market and a position is in people’s mind. You know, like people like to put other people in boxes, ideas in boxes. Like we like to stereotype because it saves a lot of time. So what kind of company is this? And sometimes if companies are very vague about themselves on the website, it’s hard to figure. I want to, I want to put you in a box. Is it the CRM or is it the, you know, live chat tool? Like what is it? So really want to know. So, so you want to give people a way to put you in a box. What is the use case? Why you and when? So currently the way we are positioning CXL Institute is, CXL Institute is not where you go for a course or training. This is when you, you go, you come to CXL Institute when you’re looking for a significant leap in your career, career transformation. This is not marketing messages, this is how we think about positioning. And in order to think about your positioning, you need to know a what all other options are your users, your target audience, what are they thinking about and who are they considering? Because you need to take a position in relation to other players in the market. In our case, what we learned from research, that if people don’t use us, they use LinkedIn Learning or Udemy. So primarily we want to position ourselves against those two. And so we have a major differentiator is the process we use. So process can be a differentiation. So you know, in udemy, anybody can put up a course. It’s not curated, it’s self service marketplace. In LinkedIn learning it’s not a marketplace, but it’s pretty much anybody can also create a course there who wants. They are producing some 60 courses a week. They’re in the volume game. So we have heavily curating the process to instructor selection. It’s a differentiation. And also the use case is not you come in and you take a one hour course and learn about a topic. The use case for us is I’m looking to get ahead. I’m looking to get a serious increase in my income, in my pay, in my future prospects. I’m ready for a career transformation. And so hence the shortest thing that we sell is not a one hour course, which is like the default for LinkedIn learning, but it’s what we call a mini degree. It’s like 100 plus hours.

Louis: And that is, that is in and of Itself a lesson in positioning. So let me just unpack what you said. So far the field of differentiation is not very well documented. There’s a lot of like a few books on the topic or agents and topic positioning, category creation, differentiation, brand building, whatever. But it’s true that you can’t really find a recipe or like a pro. It’s difficult to find this kind of structure that gives you from point A to point Z the get your way to differentiate yourself. It feels like when it feels like from like interviewing people and talking to people a lot, that some people get it and just like intrinsically get it. So they understand the need to differentiate and they kind of have this taste for it. They know, oh, that’s gonna, you know, that’s something that’s gonna tick with people or not. And you, I don’t want to like be overly like give you too many compliments because you. I’ve already given a few in the intro. But I think you are the kind of person who gets it and you just get it. So by starting your blog a few years ago, you’ve understood that creating the blog, you knew you had to create articles that were super in depth with a lot of data and not regurgitating the same shit you saw online to stand out. So you kind of had this feeling about it, you went for it and it worked. CXL Institute is another example. The mini degree way to position the course is very smart. You’re not saying it’s a long fucking course, you’re saying it’s a mini degree which is kind of you flip it on its head. You’re going to get a degree, but you’re going to spend probably like 10x less time to get it. And it’s going to help you to not only learn, but actually the jobs, the job to be done. The outcome is to get into the next path of your career. So go ahead.

Peep Laja: And I think it’s very important that in your position and in your brand, which is very related, positioning is like the foundation of it. You want to be very attractive to a certain group and at the same time you want to repel another group. And this is what makes very many people uncomfortable because they don’t want to reject anyone. So you have to be willing to say no to some people. And for instance, in our case we get daily requests for hey, can I buy a one month subscription? Our minimum is a quarter. We say no because in one month you cannot have that career transformation. We cannot deliver on a brand promise even though this person is ready to give us some money. They ask us, hey, can I buy a single one hour course? Because our Mini Degrees is essentially a bundle of multiple smaller courses. We say no because we can’t deliver on our brand promise and we’re saying no to some money. So you need to be saying no to some money, essentially. You need to be ready to do that.

You Must Repel Some People to Attract Others

Louis: This is incredibly important. I’m glad you mentioned it. And this is my pet peeves with most marketers because even though you have a global brand or whatever, you cannot appeal to everyone. Like you know, they have seven closely to 8 billion people on earth. Like if you think that your brand will touch every single one of them, will have an impact on every single one of them, you’re really mistaken by a long magnitude.

Peep Laja: So.

Louis: Exactly. I think marketing really and differentiation in particular is more about picking who you don’t want to serve than picking who you want to serve. Because most of the time the ones you don’t want to serve are way more in numbers than the ones you want to serve. Right. So making actually in your mind this, this, this thinking, what am I not going to do? Who am I not going to serve? Forces you then to focus on that. And it’s tough.

Peep Laja: It’s very tough and it requires guts. And it’s scary to say no to money, especially if you, like if you’re a small business and you need every dollar you can get. But also we can see this in big businesses. So not just about, it’s not just about pricing. Like if you can’t afford us, we say no to you. That’s easy. Ferrari doesn’t make discounts, so everybody can drive a Ferrari. But it’s also like, let’s say clothing brands like Hollister, which is a popular brand for teenage girls or so I’ve heard. So you, if you, have you been to any of those stores?

Louis: I have. My sister bought me.

Peep Laja: Okay. Okay. So you know, I’m assuming that all of their stores worldwide are pretty much the same. So like they’re getting dark and like this loud music and then they’re designed to repel the parent. So the 12 year olds go in there, the 14 year olds go in there and they like it. Also what they do is that all their clothing are small sizes only. So if you’re a heavier person, they don’t have your size. And so there’s an ethical question. Well, you’re like so judgmental and whatever and you know, like body shaming and all that stuff. And yes, you know, we might take a moral issue with it, but also the people who fit into the clothing, they’re like, yeah, I’m a Hollister girl, you know, so, you know, we might judge them ethically, but they, by repelling a group, they’re more attractive to another group. Essentially. That’s what’s happening.

Louis: Yeah, that’s a great example. It was a very bad experience for me, but my sister loved it. And this is it. This is it, right? It’s not only you want to repel people, not only on demographic stuff, which is like girl versus boys and that kind of basic gender role or whatever, but more importantly, you want to repel people on psychographic elements. And I know some people, some listeners make fun of me because I mentioned psychographic the world almost at every single interview, but it’s true. I mean, you need to repel people on things beyond who they are. You need to repel people on their beliefs. You need to attract people to believe what you want to believe.

Peep Laja: Exactly. So for bigger brands especially, it is more important, I mean, I guess brands of any size to take a stance on issues. So let’s say Nike, I said earlier they have no functional difference over Adidas or New Balance or you name it. However, if you’re buying Nike, you’re buying into the idea of that. I support gender equality because that’s the message in their ads. I buy into the idea that we should stand against police brutality even if we can lose everything. Right? So again, it pisses some people off. Some people are like, hell, yeah. Or Patagonia. I mean, so many companies make high quality clothing for outdoors, right? Patagonia being one of them. But also what the brand is differentiating by brand is all about who am I if I buy you? You know, because like I’m even. I’m not a category connoisseur when it comes to buying outdoor gear. So I don’t even know what all the best brands out there are. But what I do know about Patagonia is that if I buy it, it tells the world that, hey, I care about the environment, I hate Trump and so on and so forth, and I’m not afraid to show it. And somebody else might buy the. I don’t know what the right wing equivalent is, like outerwear, where I support

Louis: more drilling in the Arctic, but that’s what it is. And Nike did this move about to support. I’m not going to remember the name. Yeah, exactly. These guys, this American footballer who kneeled down at the game to protest against stuff, and it might have seemed very ballsy of them to do so, but they knew from research that a lot of their customers are actually African Americans who believe in that. So they didn’t take a massive risk at all. They repelled the right people. They also attracted the right. They repelled the wrong people and attracted the right one. I want to go back to something you mentioned a few minutes ago now to go back to more the scientific, the rational element of positioning differentiation. You said we’ve done our research on you that competitive alternatives of CXL, CXL institutes were LinkedIn Learning and Udemy. What else did you try to find out? So and how did you do this research? Did you ask existing customers and then apart from the competitive alternative to figure out what else did you ask them? What else did you try to know from them?

Research Methods to Find Your Competitive Alternatives

Peep Laja: So we wanted to know exactly, like if they wouldn’t choose us, what would they choose? Or before signing up with us, who else did they look at? And we surveyed the existing customers who already went through this decision making process and a lot of them were already fans for many years, which is another differentiation we can talk about. And then LinkedIn Learning and Udemy came up also, you know, some people named lesser known smaller brands like Reforge or you know, things like this. But in Reforge, while, you know, also greatly admire, I know Brian before and, and so on and so forth, they’re also small potatoes. So a small potato in the sense that like we are compared to LinkedIn learning which is massive. And then, you know, Udemy is Now valued at $2 billion. So you, you mainly, I think you want to pick a fight or differentiate against the big, the big guys because they control mind share. Because positioning is not actual, it’s like made up, it’s in the mind of the prospect and they have some idea of what one company or another is about. And so you wanna, the positioning is like, hey, we want you to put us in that box. When you’re asking what other research we did when it comes to positioning differentiation. That’s, that’s not, we didn’t really ask anything else. Well like obviously we’re researching the what people value about us and also paying attention to what are the things that people from our own sales pitches. What is the hook that people remember? We’ve been using this phrase top 1% a lot since we started and that seems to be catchy. People voluntarily say bring that up. They reflect the mirror, the language that we have put in their minds. It’s clicking, it’s hitting something. We found something that is an idea that resonates with people. And of course some people hate it, which is also we find even more encouragement because it’s polarizing. And then you have to do the factual research too. You look at the top competitors that they’re mentioning. So what are we actually doing differently? And that’s another form of differentiation. It’s called attribute differentiation. So your classic example is Volvo is for security. Yeah. Safety. Yeah. Well, they used to be at least these days. You know, I think Volvo has, is also confused what they’re all about. Or you know, BMW goes for the drivability, the ultimate driving machine. So like you own an attribute of like, what is the, you know, oh, you know, the reliable version or the safe version or the green version or like you own a particular attribute. Ferrari owns speed and so on. So you can own a functional attribute. And so in our case, that functional difference, the function, the attribute difference is curation of instructors. So we have a process. We ask who is the best in the world and we carefully select who is teaching the course, which is way different philosophy from our top competitors, which also helps us reinforce the message of career transformation, learn from the best and so on and so forth. But attribute differentiation is something that somebody could own as their differentiation in any category. You just need to figure out what is an attribute your target audience cares about. Like Ritz Carlton, the hotel chain, while, you know, everybody owns all the hospitality industry goes, goes for the service. But they’re like, it’s like embedded in their DNA where it’s like we are the ladies and gentlemen for the ladies and gentlemen. You know, so like the extreme version. So I think if you go for an attribute differentiation, so you’re like safety and Volvo, you want to double down on it. So maybe you’re competing. You say that our email marketing software does the most integrations. You know, I said it earlier that it’s not a differentiation, it’s just an example. But like if, if you wanted to really do that, you know, you want to be 10x better than the next guy, right? Like, so you have to ask yourself, can I own this attribute and be way better than them? So I recently had a chat with hotjar people, you know, a company that you might have heard of, might have heard of. And there was a discussion of hotjar is in a space that is sea of sameness. You know, I can list 20 tools that do heat maps and session replays. Right. So it’s a big problem of how are we different. So the question that the idea that I discussed can hodge our own ease of implementation as their differentiating attribute. My personal opinion is it’s not a good idea because it’s also very easy to install every other tool. Like, exactly. The difficulty level is exactly the same and like, in my opinion, it’s a table stakes feature. Maybe there is ease of implementation consideration that I’m not seeing because again, I’m not a category. Well, I am a category, so I take it back. So when you choose an attribute to differentiate on, to compete on, what I’m saying is choose carefully, analyze, poke holes in that idea.

Attribute Differentiation and Owning a Category Trait

Louis: I’m glad you mentioned this example because I actually have done a lot of research on the positioning side, very similar to what you mentioned. And so to summarize. Yeah. Looking at the competitive alternatives, picking understanding from their perspective, your people, the people you care about, not the ones you don’t care about. The people you care about, what do they, what, what does tick in their mind? What do they mention all the time? What do they care about the most for the podcast? What I’ve heard time and time again, the one word that comes back to me all the time is no bullshit or no BS or no fluff. I can. I hear that all the time, every time. So I knew I had just to reuse that and just double down on it. And I knew that some people hate it. Some people hate that I curse on the podcast. Well, fuck that, because the people that love me, that love the podcast, they love it.

Peep Laja: Right?

Louis: So exactly. Now, for Hoja, the slight difference is the reason why we’ve done work on ease as the idea and not ease of implementation, which is not the same, is that it goes beyond ease of implementation. It’s more like the ease of getting insight. The ease of getting the insight you need to create the right experiences and doubling down on as comparison, doubling down on comparing yourself to Google Analytics because when you hear about alternatives, what we found out by asking the question is people don’t use a tool like Ares most of the time, a tool like Hodja, they actually use nothing. They rely on Google Analytics and then they make guesses. So by telling the story of, we are basically giving you insight that identities can give you. That’s the main story. And we make it super easy to get those insights. That was kind of something that almost every single customer we cared about said. And so that’s kind of how we picked that as the story. Now, more work is required, but I’m glad you mentioned it because it is kind of the discussion we keep having.

Peep Laja: If you’re comparing to Google Analytics, technically, these are Separate categories, then you would be selling to people not very familiar with the category to begin with or like the alternatives to, you know, full story and you know, whatever other tools, like, because frankly, not to this, but like I find them all easy to use, you know, so I think it’s like easy to use. It’s like table stakes, you know, like I expect software to be easy to use. Like, I expect that I don’t have to read the manual, that I log in and I get it. If you fail that test, then I mean, you have no hope. Yeah.

Louis: And this is why I think when you pick your differentiation, as you said from the start, picking the right alternative to compare yourself against, turns out that in the market, to talk about this category of like the hot jar, the heat mapping tool, behavior analytics tool, turns out that I think only 10% of companies with an Alexa rank of less than 10 million, meaning the top 10 million in company sites in the world, only 10% use the a tool like errors or hoja. And so you basically compete against 90% of people who’ve never used a tool like yours. So you need to convince them to start using you. And by knowing the alternative then it’s easier to tell the story. Now for people like you, who are experts in the industry who know their stuff, just saying that we are better, we give insight that analytics can give you is not enough. And saying that we are easy without any proof or anything like that is not enough. But there is. It’s it. The story depends on your maturity.

Peep Laja: So what you’re saying is that this, this is not a mature category, but there is another differentiation idea which is that you are number one, meaning that you are the leader.

Louis: Correct.

Peep Laja: Of this category. Now, I don’t know if Hocha really is the leader. It holds a lot of mind share for sure. Yeah, yeah.

Louis: So HOJA is the leader by a long mile in terms of market share. This is another thing that I wanted to talk to you about that you hinted at before without talk about the hojar too much talking about you as well. Cxl, this is the same story you mentioned that a lot of people picked CXL Institute because they knew you from a long time. Right? They, they’ve read, they were, they were reading your, your post, your blog when for like years ago they might have been client of your agency, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, tell me more about this kind of, in my opinion, the ultimate differentiation. Right. Which is this top of mind thing.

Personal Brand as the Ultimate Differentiation

Peep Laja: So differentiation, as I said, in my view is the reason to choose you over the other guys. So if I follow Rand Fishkin and the Whiteboard Fridays, I might choose Moz as my SEO software just because I like him. Even though he’s not with the company anymore, I still might choose him because, you know, Semrush, I don’t even know who the Semrush person is. And I mean I like Tim from Ahref, so I might go with that too. But my main point is like knowing the humans behind it makes a brand is a reason to choose somebody. Basecamp founders, authors of many books, very vocal on social media about all kinds of issues including politics. And again through that, through their worldview, I respect them. I might choose basecamp as my CRM as opposed to Monday.com that advertises to me and has seemingly bought up the whole inventory on YouTube. So it’s just, just the personal brand as, as the reason to choose. We see that we, you know, Tesla, Elon Musk, which is like the greatest car personal brand thing since Henry Ford. Like what other car people can you name? Like who is, who is the CEO of Nissan or actually Nissan now, you know, since the escape story from Japan made some news, but for different reasons. So Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, you know, founders and CEOs of big ass companies, we’re still at the forefront and like the faces that you can put a human face to an anonymous corporation. So I think as you’re. If you’re marketing your company and you’re anonymous, we’re just Squad Cast two squadcast quality podcasts. It’s like I don’t know because like I don’t know any other alternatives to Squad Casts or not anything about Squad Cast really. But if they had a cool guy or girl, you know, I might choose them because of that. So that’s definitely a way to differentiate.

Louis: And so you are associating the brand recognition with a person. Right? So in the space of marketing and conversion, rate optimization and growth, a lot of people, we know you as well will associate CXL with you and you have strong point of views on a lot of issues. And so therefore people might connect or not with your view. So is there apart from having a person representing your brand? You gave good examples of that. Do you know of any other situation where a company can actually be different, differentiate itself from like this kind of very deep emotional bonds without using an actual person? Can you remain personless and have a strong brand that have people have a lot of affinity for?

Building Brand Awareness Without a Personal Brand

Peep Laja: I don’t know really. I mean people are passionate about like clothing Brands that are not, you know, associated with humans. You know, like I know people who are happy to wear certain shoe brands or clothing brands. So I think it is possible. It’s just harder. It’s just a harder game to play and requires a lot of money. If you look at the most influential brands, they make various lists. You see a lot of Procter and Gamble brands there. And this is made with money, of course, decades of buying ads. And that’s a game that you can play and win with money as well. But if you don’t have money or you don’t have as much as Procter and Gamble, it’s just, I think it’s easy, it’s relatively easy to put yourself out there. And you don’t even need to be the founder or the CEO. A good example of that is Dave Gerdhart, who was formerly VP Marketing at Drift and now not anymore at Drift, but because he took such great care of building his personal brand and associating that with Drift. Again, people like Drift maybe more than Intercom for that reason. Now he said Privy. People don’t really know what Privy does, but they probably like it because of Dave.

Louis: Yes, it’s another good example. I think brands, to answer this question as well from my side, the brands can use potentially like, you know, celebrities and do use celebrities and people who believe in the same thing to represent them as well. I think Nike does that very well. Andre. It might not be as effective, but I think if you do it very systematically, it could have the same effect. And then the other way is spending millions and millions and millions of money in advertising to build affinity, which is a strong emotional and psychological principle of the more people see you, the more they tend to like you.

Peep Laja: It’s just absolutely. And there’s strong research out there. There’s this book called How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp, which is a. A professor that has very strong opinions and has created like a cult following. And there are also lots of haters and people who disagree with him vehemently. But basically one of the key ideas from his book is that market penetration, market share is far more important than differentiation. And you buy that without dollars, essentially. So if you’re number one or two in your market, you don’t need to be different. It’s tldr. And then what is more important at that stage is distinctiveness. Distinctiveness is that you look way different on the shelf of a supermarket. So I can pick out your product. So basically owning your brand, colors and so on. So I think with money you can Escape the differentiation thing especially. I think Monday.com is an interesting recent CRM example. I don’t know anything about how successful they are, but they raised this recent round of money. I checked on Crunchbase, it was something around $150 million, and suddenly it seemed to me that they bought the whole YouTube ad inventory and then some. So everywhere I went, Monday.com, monday.com and suddenly what I started to see qualitatively is that Monday did enter the very limited consideration set of CRM tools. When people are discussing usually, oh, trello, airtable, asana, you know, oh, suddenly Monday.com is an example of people. That is an example of a tool that people would consider. Of course, if you log into Monday.com is not that different than some of the other tools there was. Recently I had this experience of a new CRM tool that doesn’t advertise. It’s called ClickUp. And that actually was a different product. I was impressed.

Louis: So you can buy your way into that and then it’s very difficult to remove you from the first place because your friends know about it, your colleagues know about it, and it’s kind of the go to thing and it enters your brain. And what I would recommend. If you’re still listening to this episode, I’m sure you are. If you’re listening to this right now, try to think of the last six months, of what brands or companies enter into your minds and are top of mind and why they are top of mind. How did they do it? You mentioned Dave Gehart is on. Is on top of my mind almost all the time. I haven’t talked to him in a while. He is, because he’s posting on LinkedIn every single fucking day. You’re also on top of my mind because you’re posting on LinkedIn almost three times a day at this stage. And it actually is working. It actually is working. And so I would recommend people to think actively, and as you said, qualitatively as well, of how are you actually influenced? And you’ll be surprised that you might be influenced very simply by just seeing the same person, the same brand every single day. And you start building affinity for it and therefore liking and therefore more likelihood to consider it to buy or to chat to or interview on a podcast.

Peep Laja: Exactly right. So what I’m doing on Twitter and LinkedIn is I’m consciously doing this for building brand awareness and, you know, reach and repetition, essentially, like I’m consciously trying to increase my LinkedIn audience and I’m measuring the reach of my messages and so on and so forth. Do again to give people another reason to choose us. It’s another because differentiation is a combination of all these factors. It’s a reason to choose you. Right.

Louis: I’ve seen you. I noticed it.

Peep Laja: Thank you.

Louis: Thank you. So it’s working. I want to be conscious of your time and we’ve been talking about it but differentiation for, for a while. But I really appreciate you talking about it and being open about the fact that you’re not an expert in it, even though I think you are. But at least being open about that and giving so many examples, so many resources to check. I have one last question before I let you go. What are the top three resources you’d recommend listeners today? It could be about the topic of differentiation, although you mentioned a lot already. The top three resources could be books, training programs, podcast, conferences, whatever.

Peep Laja: Besides the differentiation books that I already mentioned, if you are a business owner or a manager, the book that really like hit home for me is called Road Less Stupid. It’s, it’s insanely good. I even attended the guys workshop end of end of 2019. So that book like blew my mind. Super useful. Which is rare because most business books are like, yeah, that’s kind of nice. You know, that book was really, really, really good. And I’ve been, I’ve been actually digging in the classics recently like Jack Trout who’s I think passed away by now, like Differentiated Eye positioning and, and there are multiple other books, the 22 immutable laws of Marketing. There’s some really good wisdom if you can get past, if you can get past outdated examples and just contextualize it again, you’ll find a lot of gold. And finally I’ve been on a kind of a branding research as well, reading a lot of books on branding and so if you want to learn more about branding and brand management, there’s a trilogy, all very short books that I would recommend by Marty Neumeyer, Brand Gap, Zag and Brand Flip. You can read those in a, in a weekend.

Louis: Excellent. Thanks so much for the resources. And obviously CXL Institute contains so many training programs, mini degrees, courses on digital psychology, conversion like acquisition. I mean it’s really good stuff. And HOJA is actually paying for the courses and I’m going to take a few in the next few weeks. Where can listeners connect with you, learn more from you apart from LinkedIn or

Peep Laja: maybe LinkedIn, Twitter obviously I see CXL.com, copytesting.com new startup and you know, hopefully in 2021 on the bookshelves of Barnes and Nobles because I’m writing a book on differentiation.

Louis: Oh, you are? Interesting. Okay, well, let me know about it. Pep, Once again, thanks so much for your time.

Peep Laja: Thank. You.

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