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means choosing to focus and concentrate your energies in order to provide yourself with an advantage. You go about this by establishing your brand as the source of a certain benefit. If you don't, you probably won't be identified with any benefit and consumers will have no good reason to think of you and buy from you when they need or desire something. When you adopt a strategy, you're "giving up" all sorts of things that you don't actually have in order to acquire something tangible, something you can sink your teeth into. The second terrifying characteristic of strategy is differentiation from competitors. To be different, that's really a possibility that could cause nightmares. Why? Primarily because basic conservatism says that if that's what everyone does, there must be a good reason for it. And that's true. The component of "good management practices," which everyone strives for, is essential. It doesn't create an advantage over competitors and you should never confuse it with strategy, but it is essential. Beyond this, managers are always so busy dealing with competition that they are more worried about preventing their competitors from gaining an advantage than they are about creating an advantage for themselves. And so those managers are busy trying to imitate their competitors rather than striving to be different. A good defensive game really does help you not lose. But in order to win, you need to score every now and then. For this, you need a strategy. No alternative, sorry. The 5 Percent That Makes All the Difference By definition, strategy is the way you plan to achieve your goals. In a competitive environment, your goal is for your customer to buy from you and not from your competitors. Therefore, strategy is the way in which you plan to achieve an advantage over your competitors, in the consumers' eyes. Differentiation is almost always a pre-condition for achieving such advantage. You must do something differently from your competitors so that you provide certain consumers with a good reason for preferring you. Many marketers think that differentiation means that a company has to be different than its competitors from A to Z. Not true. The comforting secret is that you don't need to be different in everything in order to succeed, only in certain things. If you look at the managers of competing companies in the same market category, no matter what the field, you'll see that 95 percent of their concerns, decisions and day-to-day activities are