Take our online Differentiation Assessment Test for instant, anonymous results.

Read more about our professional service firm marketing and management ideology in Suzanne Lowe's books:

Marketplace Masters

Our articles on differentiation:

Break out of the Pack

The Top 10 Differentiation Approaches

Why Differentiate Your Firm?

Differentiation is one of the 11 competencies outlined in Marketplace Masters.

Differentiation Strategy Consulting

Differentiation is a crucial strategy for professional service firms to achieve pre-emptive competitive advantage. In order to be properly conceived, it requires careful consideration of multiple organizational nuances and complex marketplace factors, and a commitment to push past old boundaries. In order to be truly successful, a differentiation strategy must be operationally supported by a market-driven infrastructure.

Often, professional service firm leaders find it helpful to begin the differentiation process on a solid footing: we offer them the opportunity to do just that.

In our high-impact differentiation summits professional service firm leaders will learn:

Exactly what differentiation is and isn’t.
How differentiation relates to other firm-wide strategies (including positioning and branding).
How differentiation has helped other businesses to achieve marketplace dominance. (We will use actual examples of the critical foundations upon which effective differentiation can be built.)
The six criteria upon which any differentiation strategy should be assessed.

From there, we lead summit attendees through powerful exercises to identify differentiation strategies that will work best for their firms. We examine how well they can support the strategies internally, and how they can be be tested qualitatively and quantitatively with external audiences.

Our differentiation strategy summits can also be configured to include:

Competitive analysis of the ostensible differentiation strategies of competing firms and the related marketplace opportunities that appear available
Guidance on an optimal framework for conducting qualitative research on the linked differentiation, positioning and branding platforms (including a description of projective and laddering interviewing techniques and hierarchical value maps).