I’m working on a response to an RFP which includes this very typical line:

[Blank] College will initiate a strategic approach to identify and establish its uniqueness.

O.K., I understand. We’re all experts in marketing and one of the things we all know, one of the things we all read on blog after blog and one of the first things that any consultant who wants our business will tell us is that we have to find the thing that makes us UNIQUE.

But, seriously, what is this? Some feel-good mindset (or a rip-off of a Christina Aguilera song) – we’re all special in our own unique way?

Guess what? You’re not unique. And not only that, marketing practiced by people who know what they are doing is not about finding out what makes you unique. It’s about differentiating you in crowded marketplace where consumers have a difficult time perceiving differences.

Not only are none of us unique in ways that are significant to marketers, academic institutions have a particularly strong uniqueness deficit. For the past 20 years, the overwhelming trend in higher education has been to whittle down real differences that exist between institutions. Everybody built new gyms, funded interdisciplinary programs and promoted study abroad. If you were a large public you ramped up your honors college. If you were a small private, you built a science building. Large and small, you are now totally smitten by the idea of sustainability.

One reason academic institutions have done this is that, at least as far as the prestige academic sector is concerned, the market doesn’t want real differentiation. The market wants institutions that look alike and offer similar offerings. The institutions have responded.

Actual marketing is about differentiating a message to cut through the enormous amount of cognitive static in the marketplace. This is a much more sophisticated process than something as simplistic as finding your authentic uniqueness. (Could someone actually admit that good marketing is a sophisticated and complicated endeavor?) I’ll close with an example: in 1917 when Lucky Strike cigarettes developed the highly successful brand differentiator that their cigarettes used tobacco that was toasted, in fact it was not an actual meaningful point of differentiation. The fact that Lucky Strike’s used toasted tobacco had no perceptible impact on the flavor of the cigarettes. But Lucky Strike made it sound like an important point of differentiation through advertising. The rest is history. And that, for better or worse, is at the heart of marketing.