Why Us? 7 Lessons on Standing Out in a Crowded Market

If your organisation disappeared tomorrow, who would miss you, and why?

Most leadership teams I work with struggle to answer that in a sentence. It isn't because they're not good at what they do. It's because crowded markets have a funny way of making everyone look the same. We benchmark against each other, copy what seems to work, and slowly sand off everything that made us interesting.

For-purpose organisations feel this more than most, whether you're a not-for-profit, a social enterprise or a purpose-driven business like a B Corp. Every website says "person-centred", "sustainable", "making a difference" and "passionate team". Customers, funders, investors and great staff can't tell anyone apart, so they fall back on price, or whoever they already know.

So I went looking for the best thinking on how to stand out and I pulled out the 7 lessons that kept coming up from some of the top authors on strategy, positioning, marketing and creative thinking. Here they are, each with a real story, a question to take to your next leadership meeting, and one small thing to try this week.

1. Stop benchmarking, start breaking the rules

From Different by Youngme Moon and Zag by Marty Neumeier

Harvard professor Youngme Moon found that the harder companies compete, the more alike they become. Her answer is to break the unwritten rules of your category on purpose.

IKEA did exactly that. From 1956 it sold flat-pack furniture: no salespeople, no delivery, build it yourself. On paper it's a worse service. But IKEA dropped what customers could live without and nailed what mattered, good design at a price young families could afford. Researchers later found people valued furniture they'd built themselves so much they'd pay 63% more for it. The weakness became part of the love.

Ask your team: Which "that's just how it's done" habits in our sector do our clients not actually care about?

Try this week: pick one "that's how it's done" habit, like a report nobody reads or a standard meeting, and stop it for 30 days. Notice who misses it.

2. Logic takes you to the same place as everyone else

From Alchemy by Rory Sutherland and A New Way to Think by Roger Martin

Rory Sutherland's big point: people aren't logical, they're psychological. If you and your competitors follow the same sensible steps, you'll all end up in the same place.

When Red Bull was tested in the 1980s, people hated the taste, the logo and the name. Founder Dietrich Mateschitz called it a disaster. The logical fix was a nicer taste, a bigger can and a lower price. He did the opposite. A small can, a high price and a strange taste told people's brains this drink must be doing something. In 2025, Red Bull sold more than 13.9 billion cans.

Ask your team: Take your most sensible decision from the last year. What's the opposite, and could it work too?

Try this week: take one decision you're about to make the sensible way, and run a small, cheap test of the opposite.

3. Know what you're really up against

From Obviously Awesome by April Dunford and Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt

April Dunford says your real competitor is often not the organisation down the road. It's what your client does if you don't exist, which is often nothing at all.

When Scott Harrison started charity: water in 2006, his real competitor wasn't other charities. It was people who didn't give because they didn't trust where the money went. So he promised that 100% of public donations fund water projects, with private donors covering running costs, and showed donors photos and GPS locations of their projects. By 2025 it had raised more than US$1 billion.

Ask your team: If we didn't exist, what would our clients do instead?

Try this week: call 3 clients and ask, "If we didn't exist, what would you have done instead?" Write down their exact words.

4. Name your own category

From Play Bigger by Ramadan, Peterson, Lochhead and Maney, and Getting Beyond Better by Roger Martin and Sally Osberg

If you compete in someone else's category, you're judged by their rules. The organisations that win big name a new problem and teach people to see it their way.

In 1999, Salesforce didn't build a better version of boxed software. Its logo was the word "software" crossed out, and its message was "No Software". In the social sector, Muhammad Yunus lent US$27 to 42 women in a Bangladeshi village in 1976. He didn't set out to be a nicer bank. He helped create microcredit, a whole new category, and later shared the Nobel Peace Prize.

Ask your team: How would we describe the problem we solve without using any of our sector's words?

Try this week: rewrite the first line of your website without any sector words, then read it to 3 people outside your sector and ask them to say it back.

5. Matter deeply to a few

From This Is Marketing and Purple Cow by Seth Godin, and The Pumpkin Plan by Mike Michalowicz

Seth Godin says find the smallest group of people you can truly matter to. Trying to please everyone feels safe, but it just makes you forgettable. Mike Michalowicz says to grow around your best clients, the way farmers cut back a vine to grow one giant pumpkin.

In 2012, three Melbourne founders made toilet paper interesting. Who Gives A Crap uses recycled paper or bamboo, cheeky wrapping, and gives 50% of profits to sanitation. To raise the first A$50,000, co-founder Simon Griffiths sat on a toilet, live-streamed, for 50 hours. They never chased every shopper, just people who care about the planet and love a joke. By 2024 they'd donated more than A$13 million.

Ask your team: Who are our three best clients ever, and what would we stop doing if we only served people like them?

Try this week: write down your 3 best clients ever, then refer on the next enquiry that looks nothing like them.

6. Show your thinking in public

From Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon and The Win Without Pitching Manifesto by Blair Enns

People can't choose you for being different if they can't see it. Austin Kleon says share how you think, not just your results. Blair Enns adds the balance: share freely in public, but don't give away free advice to win one job.

In December 2013, Buffer published every employee's salary online, plus the formula behind it. Job applications went from about 1,200 in the month before to about 2,800 in the month after. Buffer didn't just list transparency as a value. It showed it.

Ask your team: Does our website tell people what we value, or show them?

Try this week: publish one decision you made this month and why, on LinkedIn or your website.

7. Your odd mix is your edge, so hire for it

From Range by David Epstein, Originals by Adam Grant, Zero to One by Peter Thiel and Rebel Ideas by Matthew Syed

David Epstein found that people with a wide range of experience often spot what specialists miss.

Gunpei Yokoi joined Nintendo in 1965 to maintain machines on the production line. He described himself as having "a sort of vague knowledge of everything". His Game Boy used old, cheap technology and a black and white screen. When told a rival had a colour screen, he said, "Then we're fine." Colour drained batteries. The Game Boy sold about 118 million units.

Matthew Syed shows the flip side. In Rebel Ideas, he describes how the CIA, which for decades had mostly hired people from very similar backgrounds, missed warning signs before 9/11. Nobody in the room was stupid. They just all had the same blind spots.

My own path is a good example. I spent years in finance: a discount broker, a private bank, a global wealth manager, then a boutique investment company doing venture capital and private equity. Somewhere along the way, I hit what I can only call a midlife crisis. I'd checked out, and I had to work on myself from the inside out. So I stepped back from the corporate world and became a stay-at-home dad, and I did Hakomi training (a mindful approach to self-awareness). And because babies don't come with instructions, I went looking for some. I became a certified Parenting by Connection instructor, and contributed to a parenting book called Listen. Now I run my own executive and business coaching business. On paper it looks like a detour. In practice it's how I coach: I can read a balance sheet, and I can read a room.

So here's the uncomfortable question. If we all study the same things, go to the same universities, and keep hiring people with the same degrees and backgrounds, how are we ever going to think differently? Thinking differently starts with hiring differently: people who grew up with different experiences, trained in different things, and, in for-purpose organisations, people with lived experience at the leadership table.

Ask your team: Where did each of us study and work, and who isn't in the room? And what important truth do very few people agree with us on?

Try this week: invite someone with a very different background into your next leadership meeting, and let them ask the first question.

A word on AI

If we all use the same tool, how are we different? AI can get you to the same place as everyone else, only faster. Ask the same AI the same question as your competitors and you'll all get the same sensible, average answer. In a 2024 study in Science Advances, stories written with AI ideas were better one by one, but about 10% more alike.

So AI isn't your edge. Everyone has it. The edge is what you bring to it: your own stories, your customers, your odd mix of experience, and the judgement to push back on what it hands you. Use it to sharpen your thinking, not to replace it.

Where to start

Millard Fuller, who founded Habitat for Humanity, said it's easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting. So don't try all seven at once. Pick the lesson that made you most uncomfortable reading it, and do its action this week. That's usually the one your organisation needs most.

And if your team's scores surprise you, or you can't agree on them, let's have a chat. Helping for-purpose leaders answer "why us?" is the work I love most.