How You Are Seen

The point

Be different, special and advantageous in the eyes of your clients. Strategic fascination, another 300% increase factor: innovation, passion, power, prestige, trust, mystique, alert.

Jay Abraham · Redondo Beach 2023 — Day 2, Morning Cued to 2:07:44 1 min 31 sec loading…

Why it matters

Your clients act on how they perceive you far more than on the objective reality of who you are, and that perception is a hidden asset you can engineer deliberately. Compete to be marginally better than the people around you and you land in the crowded, exhausting, discountable middle — the most expensive address a business can choose, because everybody living there is paying to be compared. Different is better than better. Sally Hogshead spent a career studying why some brands fascinate while others are ignored, and reduced the game to that line. One clear point of difference, carried consistently across every touch a client has with you, becomes an advantage no competitor can copy, because copying it properly would require them to become you. Distinction compounds the way real leverage always does. A little more distinct at one touch, and again at the next, and again at the one after that — and those differences multiply against each other rather than adding up in a straight line. A handful of clear distinctions, compounded, become a position nobody can price against. Aritzia improved margin by over 700 basis points on one precise promise; On Holding runs roughly 60% gross margin. Then it stops being a quality and becomes property. Coca-Cola defends the shape of one bottle and a single handwritten word with an entire wall of trademarks, because you could pick that bottle out of a thousand in the dark and read that script from clear across a stadium.

The mistake almost everyone makes

Trying to be better at the thing everybody in the category already claims. Better is a comparison, and a comparison is an invitation to be priced against. Different is a category of one, and there is nothing in it to compare you to.

The test: Say the sentence a client would use to describe you to somebody else. If it would fit three of your competitors word for word, you are better, not different.

Where it shows up — 8 worked examples

Who	What happened
Hims & Hers	Removed shame and delay from stigmatized health needs rather than improving the product, and reached roughly $1.5 billion in revenue.
On Holding	Translated running-shoe engineering into the felt sensation of running on clouds, commanding about 60% gross margin.
De Beers	Attached diamonds to permanence and commitment with A Diamond Is Forever. No molecule changed; the meaning did.
Nike	Adidas is iconic, but Nike owns the archetype of the athlete itself — a position deep enough to survive years of underperformance.
Aritzia	Resolved the luxury-versus-wearability tension with one precise promise, Everyday Luxury, and improved margin by over 700 basis points.
Blendtec	Stopped explaining and started demonstrating, blending iPhones and golf balls into dust. Sales reportedly rose 700%.
Glossier	Launched through an online community that helped design the products, building legitimacy through direct access rather than shelf space.
Coca-Cola	The same technology cut both ways — a remix platform for artists multiplied its impact, while cold synthetic holiday advertising damaged it.

What it solves

The words a business owner uses for this before anybody has told them the name of it. If one of these is a sentence you have said out loud, this is your strategy.

We are a slightly better version of everyone else“If a client put our proposal next to two others, I am not sure they could tell which one was ours.”One point of genuine difference, carried across every touch, in place of the crowded middle where everybody is paying to be compared.
Every conversation ends at price“We keep getting compared on cost, because nobody can see what else there is to compare.”A position that cannot be priced against, because there is nothing equivalent standing next to it to price it against.
We do not know what we are known for“If you asked five of our clients what we are best at, I think you would get five different answers.”The sentence your clients would actually use, written down and tested against the same sentence for your three closest competitors.
We hide the strange thing about us“There is something unusual about how we work and we play it down, because sounding normal feels safer.”The case for amplifying the strangeness rather than sanding it off, and what happens to margin when you do.
Our best work happens where nobody sees it“We are a bit different in three or four places and none of it seems to add up to anything.”Why distinction compounds — a little more distinct at one touch and again at the next, so the differences multiply against each other rather than adding in a straight line.
The advisor's version“I can hear the sameness in how my clients describe themselves and I have no method for fixing it.”A repeatable method for finding a client's one distinction, so you stop hearing the same description from every business you work with.

The challenge

Name your one distinction and lead with it.

Write the sentence a client would use to describe you to a friend. Then write the same sentence for your three closest competitors. If the four are interchangeable, you have found the problem, and it is not your marketing budget. Now name the single thing you do that none of the three could honestly claim, and move it to the front — first line of the page, first thing said on a call, first line of the proposal — for seven days.

How you will know it is done Four description sentences written, your own distinction named, and it moved to the front of the page, the call and the proposal.

The AI layer · second pass

Once this is working, here is what to multiply

Improve the system first. Then multiply it. This panel is the second run at the strategy above, and it is deliberately useless until the first run is done.

Before you point anything at this You have written the sentence a client uses to describe you, and your three competitors' versions.

What it multiplies Carrying that one distinction through every touch a client has with you — page, proposal, reply, invoice — and catching the places where it quietly went missing.

The trap Producing the average of everything already written in your category, which is the crowded middle rendered at speed. A machine defaults to what sounds like everyone; Coca-Cola found this out when the same tool that let artists remix the bottle also generated a warmth nobody believed.