What Do You Want to Be Known For?

This is a question I ask in almost every brand strategy project. It sounds simple but it rarely is.

Most established business owners can tell me what they do. They can list their services, tell me who their clients are and talk me through everything they’ve built over the years.

But ask them what they want to be known for, and there’s often a pause.

Because that question asks you to choose.

And choosing means deciding what you're not going to lead with.

Being good at lots of things can actually make you harder to choose

This is particularly common in businesses that have grown organically.

You started offering one service. A client asked for something else, so you added it. Another opportunity appeared and you added that too.

A few years later, you've built up an impressive range of skills and services.

So naturally, you put all of them on your website.

The problem is that your potential client now has to work out what you're actually best at.

And people rarely do that work for us.

They look at your business alongside three or four others and make a very quick judgement about where each one fits.

If everybody is saying some variation of:

Experienced. Professional. Bespoke. Personal. Results-driven.

there's very little to help them choose.

That's why positioning isn't simply about explaining everything you do.

It's about giving people something clear to remember you for.

Look at what your competitors are claiming

One of the most useful exercises in brand strategy is also one of the simplest.

Open the websites of five or six of your closest competitors.

Don't just look at their colours or logos. Look at what they're actually saying.

• What do they lead with?

• What do they promise?

• Who are they speaking to?

• What words keep appearing?

• What do they seem to want to be known for?

• You will often discover that an entire industry is saying almost exactly the same thing.

And that's useful.

Because the goal isn't to find a cleverer way of saying the same thing.

It's to work out what you can credibly own that they can't.

Your clients may already know the answer

If you're struggling to work out what makes you different, go back to your clients.

• What do they consistently thank you for?

• Why did they choose you?

• What surprised them about working with you?

• What do they tell other people when they recommend you?

Sometimes what you think you're selling isn't the thing they value most.

A consultant might think clients hire her for her knowledge, when what they really value is her ability to make an incredibly complicated situation feel manageable.

A designer might think clients come for beautiful design, when they're actually choosing her because she understands the commercial problem behind it.

A coach might think her methodology is the differentiator, when clients repeatedly talk about the speed with which she gets to the heart of what's holding them back.

Those patterns matter.

Your strongest positioning is rarely something you invent from scratch.

Quite often, it's something that's already true about the business that you haven't been communicating clearly enough.

You don't need to be unique

This is where I think some positioning advice makes things unnecessarily difficult.

You don't need to discover something nobody in the history of your industry has ever done before.

You need to give the right client a clear reason to choose you.

That might come from your particular experience.

Your point of view.

The audience you understand exceptionally well.

The way you approach a familiar problem.

The combination of skills you bring together.

Or the problem you've decided to become particularly good at solving.

The important part is that it's specific enough to mean something.

Show people the work you want more of

Your positioning isn't just what you say.

It's also what you choose to show.

If you want larger branding projects but your portfolio is full of small website jobs, you're reinforcing the old positioning.

If you want to work with established businesses but all your testimonials talk about helping people get started, you're sending a conflicting signal.

If you want to become known for strategic thinking but your content consists entirely of quick design tips, people will continue to see you as a designer rather than a strategist.

This can be one of the hardest parts of repositioning an established business.

You have evidence of everything you've done.

But you don't have to show all of it.

Curate your brand around the work you want next, not simply the work you've done before.

Focus can feel like you're turning business away

This is often where the nerves kick in.

• If I talk specifically to these people, what about everyone else?

• If I lead with this service, will people realise I can also do the others?

• If I become known for this, am I closing the door on something else?

Possibly.

But the alternative is often a brand that leaves every door open and gives nobody a particularly compelling reason to walk through one.

You can still take other work. You can still have several services. You can still work with people outside your core audience.

Positioning doesn't dictate every piece of work you're allowed to accept. It determines what you want the market to associate you with.

And that distinction matters.

So, what do you want to be known for?

Not:

What can you do?

But:

What do you want someone to think of when they hear your name?

What problem do you want people to immediately associate with you? What kind of client do you want someone to confidently refer to you? What work would you happily become known for doing exceptionally well?

And what do your clients already value about you that your competitors would find difficult to replicate?

There will probably be several possible answers.

Your job is to find the one worth building around. Because strong brands don't try to be remembered for everything.

They make it very easy to remember them for something.