With niching and positioning always on the brain, an article caught my eye recently by a few professors of architecture and urban planning titled:

“Indie coffee shops are meant to counter corporate behemoths like Starbucks – so why do they all look the same?”

I’m all too familiar with the premise. On many occasions, I’ve gone to meet a friend for coffee, but it’s too busy, so we go to another indie coffee shop around the corner.

Essentially the same look, feel and service.

Same exposed brick. Chalkboard menu. Vintage furniture.

Same functional experience, no substitution cost.

Professors Kickert, Parker and Gregg suggest a few stacked reasons for the lookalike paradox, which when combined, result in a self-reinforcing homogenization loop:

• We’re shown what a coffee shop “should” look like
• So we respond positively when a coffee shop looks like that
• Which is why an individual coffee shop decide to look like that
• And now all coffee shops look like that

From a consumer’s standpoint, it’s both comforting and depressing — you have more options to get what you want (or have been trained to want), but the trade-off is little room for variety and differentiation.

And at a market-level, this breeds commoditization, which kills margins, so no wonder, as the article mentions, most coffee shops don’t last longer than 5 years.

We see this in our world as consultants, too.

There are some professional standards we know our clients have come to expect:

• A decent website
• An active LinkedIn presence
• Some sort of thought leadership channel

So we go after those as a marketing "strategy." But then the homogenization really kicks in when we look at what our peers are doing:

• We see what a ‘good’ website looks like, and we emulate it
• We see LinkedIn engagement, and try to replicate it
• We see a content format that appears to be working, and we pattern-match against it

And all of a sudden, even within our own domain, we’ve turned into a digital strip mall of commoditized indie consultancies.

Now, the obvious advice here would be to say “stand out!” “buck the trend!” “zig where they zag!” - but the truth is our clients do, in fact, look for those comforting features.

They’re table stakes.

So where can we differentiate?

On what lies underneath those common but necessary bones:

• Niche - Center yourself around a specific, painful, underserved problem and client type
• Lens - Tease out your unique view on that problem for that client type
• IP - Find interesting ways to codify and transfer that lens to others
• Proof - Share real stories of helping others, in your words or theirs

Focus on these, and you’ll find clients that seek you out not just for a cozy place to sit and sip — they can do that anywhere — but rather for your special brew.

💡

-Wes