Everyone wants a distinctive brand. Nobody wants to make a distinctive decision.

I've spent more than twenty years working in marketing, and I've noticed that almost every business, regardless of size, sector, or what it sells, wants to be known for being different.

It's usually near the top of the brief, alongside wanting to be more innovative, more customer-focused, and, if we're going for the full set of marketing buzzwords, a trusted partner who challenges convention.

Everyone wants to stand out from the competition; build a reputation people remember and have something interesting to say about why customers should choose them.

All perfectly reasonable ambitions, particularly when you're operating in a market where everyone else is trying to do exactly the same thing.

The trouble starts when being different requires an actual decision, and suddenly standing out becomes a little less comfortable.

We want to be premium, although we'd rather not put anyone off with our prices. We want to be specialists, while still offering our services to anyone who might have a budget. We want a bold and distinctive tone of voice, as long as it's professional, reassuring, approachable, authoritative, disruptive and doesn't make anyone in the leadership team feel remotely uncomfortable.

Ideally, we'd like to appeal to everyone, offend nobody, win every pitch and somehow emerge from the whole exercise looking completely unlike our competitors.

The problem with wanting to be everything

One of the things I've always found interesting about brand positioning is how quickly a conversation about what makes a business different can turn into a conversation about everything that business is capable of doing.

You start by asking what the company wants to be known for, and before long there's an impressive list of services, capabilities, sectors, audiences, values and aspirations covering approximately everything except the ability to make a decent cup of tea, although I'm sure that could be included under workplace culture.

Nobody wants to leave anything out, understandably, because leaving something out can feel rather like telling a potential customer you're not interested in their money.

For founders in particular, I think this is a genuinely difficult balance to get right.

When you're building a business, opportunities matter, and saying no to work can feel like an extraordinary luxury when you've spent the previous three weeks wondering whether anyone is going to respond to your proposal.

There's also a natural instinct to show people everything you're capable of, particularly when you've built up years of experience and know you can turn your hand to all sorts of problems.

Over time, however, it's quite easy for a business that started with a clear idea of what made it special to become a collection of things it happens to be able to do.

Another service gets added to the website, another audience gets included in the proposition, and eventually the distinctive little business you started begins to sound remarkably like everyone else.

You can almost hear the original positioning quietly packing its bags.

The brands we remember have made choices

I think IKEA is a useful example of how much the decisions behind a business can shape the brand people experience.

Its commitment to making well-designed furniture affordable to more people has influenced everything from product design to packaging, distribution and how its stores operate.

You collect your flat-pack boxes, take them home, assemble the furniture and, depending on your level of patience, spend a perfectly pleasant Saturday afternoon discovering that your relationship is apparently going to be tested by a wardrobe and a small bag of screws.

Yet those choices help make the business model work and support the promise IKEA makes to its customers.

It knows what matters to the people it wants to serve, and it's built much of the business around delivering it.

Of course, IKEA has the advantage of being an enormous global brand with decades of experience, which is all very well when your own business currently consists of you, your laptop and a slightly optimistic financial forecast.

Still, the principle is relevant at almost any size.

A consultancy that has chosen to specialise in helping businesses through a particular stage of growth has a very clear story to tell about the problems it understands, the expertise it brings and the customers it's best placed to help.

A broader consultancy might have equally talented people and deliver equally excellent work, although it may need to work a little harder to explain why somebody should choose it over the competition.

Both approaches can be commercially successful, and there are plenty of excellent businesses built around broad capabilities. The important thing is understanding the choices you're making and what you want people to associate with your business as a result.

Your brand is shaped by the decisions people experience

This is the part of brand building I find particularly interesting, because so much of what makes a business distinctive develops through decisions that never appear in a marketing plan.

How you price your services, which customers you prioritise, the way you recruit, how quickly you respond when something goes wrong and the experience you create for the people who choose you all influence what your business becomes known for.

Customers don't tend to organise their experiences according to which department was responsible. They simply form an opinion about what you're like to work with.

A business that claims to make life straightforward for customers has a great opportunity to prove that belief through how it operates. If someone then has to complete eleven forms, attend four introductory meetings and wait six working days for approval of a fairly ordinary request, the brand promise might start to feel a little ambitious.

Every promise creates an expectation, and the way a business behaves determines whether people believe it.

This can also feel liberating for smaller businesses, which might not have enormous marketing budgets or the resources to commission an elaborate brand campaign.

Sometimes the strongest proof of what makes you different comes from how you've chosen to do things, especially when those choices solve a frustration customers have come to accept as normal.

Of course, distinctive branding, creative identity, and clever storytelling all play an enormous role. Businesses selling similar products can build very different reputations through the personalities, associations and experiences they create.

I've seen enough brilliant businesses struggle to explain themselves to know that being good at something and being good at communicating it are two very different skills.

The interesting opportunity comes when the story you're telling is supported by meaningful decisions people can recognise and experience.

Suddenly, you have something specific to talk about, examples that show your values, and a much clearer explanation of why someone might want to work with you.

Which is considerably more compelling than another promise to deliver innovative, customer-centric solutions.

So, what have you actually chosen to be known for?

I think it's worth occasionally setting the marketing materials aside and looking at the decisions that have shaped your business.

What have you chosen to do differently? What do you care enough about to protect, even when compromising might be easier? What do your customers experience that makes them remember you?

Perhaps most interestingly, what have you deliberately decided you won't do?

The answers don't need to involve a radical business model, a revolutionary product or a grand commitment to transform an industry that was getting along perfectly well before you arrived.

Sometimes a company's most distinctive trait comes from a relatively ordinary decision made consistently over time, until it becomes what people recognise, value, and recommend.

Naturally, commercial reality plays a part in all of this. I've yet to meet a founder who can pay their mortgage entirely in brand purpose, and I'm fairly confident HMRC wouldn't be especially receptive to the suggestion.

Still, I wonder how many businesses spend time and money trying to sound different while overlooking decisions that could give them a much more interesting story to tell.

After all, if we want people to remember us for something, we probably need to give them something worth remembering.