Kindling 42: Do the difficult thing

Organizations become brands when they can identify the hard, in-demand things that only they can do. (Once you do the identification work, then you can have a ​“brand identity.” Otherwise, you just have a logo. Very useful, but not the same.)

If you are identifying the difficult thing you do, you need to know that there are two kinds of hard things:

1. The difficult things that your competitors do. 
2. The difficult thing only you can do. 

On difficult thing your competitors do: If you’re considering doing a difficult thing that your competitors already do, then you’ve lost. Yes, these things are hard to do, and it’s tempting for you to do them. After all, you want to keep up with your competition. But if you succeed, you have expended a lot of effort, only to become undifferentiated.

On difficult thing only you can do: First, it’s hard to identify what this thing is. This is the whole point of a brand identity process, though. A great brand should be able to answer ​“the only blank that does blank.” Do you know how you would fill in those blanks?

If you identify the difficult thing only you can do, the temptation there is to pretend you don’t need to do it. After all, it’s hard. But people pay more for difficult things. If you can’t find the hard thing only you can do, you will never have more than middling success.

On change: The world can still throw you a curveball. Sometimes things change, and a hard thing becomes easy. Typesetting became trivial once the Mac democratized publishing. Digital photo editing rendered darkrooms antiquities. LLMs make programming substantially easier. 

If your hard thing is no longer hard, you need to find a new hard thing, lest you become irrelevant. That hard thing can be similar to your old thing, but with a new pitch. You can move upstream (with less customer volume) or downstream (with more customer volume). You can change your business model to something more difficult to achieve, narrow your niche (like those infamous COBOL engineers), or change industries altogether.

But your brand can’t stay still. You must embrace what only you can do. Fill in your ​“only” blanks. By necessity, this means you will do something that hasn’t been done before. Or you’ll do a known thing the way nobody else does.

The world needs more people and organizations with the courage to do new, hard things.

Things worth sharing

1. A rabbit hole worth learning from: the history of Japan’s largest whisky brand.
2. From Cory Doctorow: The AI bubble is different from the internet bubble.
3. A new guitar company from the co-founder of Studio Neat: Offkilter Guitars has a nice website (rare), a surprising body shape (also rare), and a great pitch (very rare). I’m a fan.

A question to ponder

Do you think the hard thing you do will still be hard in ten years? If it won’t be, what are you doing about your positioning today?

Until next week,

Nathan

PS. After we make the move to Nevada…

What you should do next…

1. For more insights like this, subscribe to the weekly Kindling newsletter.
2. To see people walk the talk, explore my case studies.
3. Schedule a free call to review your brand and website. Get a one hour consultation where we discuss your brand, your current marketing problems, and potential next steps. If you’re not ready to work with somebody like me, I won’t even attempt to sell you.