Are your brand differentiators better than green carpet?
In the age of ubiquity and sameness, do you know what it is about your brand that attracts and retains customers? Have you asked them?
The “iconic” Portland International Airport carpet has been gone for nearly a decade but when the airport’s new terminal opens later this year, visitors will finally be able to take real airport carpet selfies again. Photo Credit to The Oregonian
Are your brand differentiators better than green carpet?
How do you think about your brand differentiators? Actually, that’s the wrong question. How do your customers feel about your differentiators is the right question. Assuming you tick all the boxes on being functional, ie you meet your service delivery promise, your product does what you advertise, what makes your company different? And by different, I mean what makes your company special to your customers (and team).
Let’s play a game. If your brand were an airport, what airport would you want it to be? Let’s agree that 99.9% of airports move people and goods safely and securely. Lots of people work in airports. And airplanes take off and land each day. Some planes are late, most are on time.
The challenge of ubiquity
We live in a time where most airports feel exactly the same to travelers (customers): same colors, same chain restaurants, same seats in the concourse, same access to the varied priority lounges. Some airports have sparrows flying around inside the terminal (hello DTW and CDG). They all have three-letter codes to identify them. Most of them know how to quickly handle a snowstorm (nothing like watching snow removal in Minneapolis even if your flight is delayed. It’s a thing of art).
The airport that stands out to me is PDX in Portland, Oregon. Why PDX?
PDX offers all of the services, restaurants and features that you’d expect in an airport. The food is good. The coffee is excellent. The hallways are wide. This is all as it should be. The difference though, is under your feet.
In 1988 the airport installs green and teal carpet throughout the terminals. Imagine: the airport is quieter than most. Sound doesn’t bounce from hard surface to hard surface. The carpet lasts until 2013, when, after 30 years of use, wear and tear has won out and the carpet is replaced.
Queue the freak out.
The airport was unprepared for the public backlash against removing green and teal geometric carpet. The carpet design was added to t-shirts and hats.
The carpet was even chosen as the Grand Marshal of the Rose Festival’s Starlight Parade in 2015.
“It’s a love that runs deep,” said Allison Ferré, a spokesperson for the Port of Portland.
And if you follow the story, the carpet is recreated—color matched and height matched—from a scrap of the original, and installed in special areas so that travelers can once again take carpet selfies. The backlash lasted from 2015 until 2024.
How this ties to differentiators
The Portland Airport Authority had no idea that the carpet was so important to the people of Portland. In removing it, they had to manage a minefield of public outcry and it drove up dissatisfaction for the overall airport renovation project.
If your leadership team isn’t tuned in to your brand differentiators, like PDX, you run the risk of the equivalent of removing the green and teal carpet. This is the time of ubiquity: there’s always another cybersecurity platform, SaaS product, or financial institution out there that is happy to absorb your clients. If your customers feel like you don’t get them, they’ll leave.
Because if you got them as much as you say you do, you wouldn’t have removed the feature they loved or the silly character from your website. AI makes this all harder because competitors can copy the ubiquitous elements of your brand and product/service offering without doing the work of developing their own brand. And wait for it, this can make it easier for your customers to switch to your competitor because your competitor feels enough like you.
What to do?
Spend some time in your customer’s shoes and ask yourself: what’s your company’s green and teal carpet? Then, start a project to interview your customers and see if your hunch is aligned to what they feel. And then listen to what your customers say, even if it runs counter to what you think they should believe.
Schedule time with me if you’d like to talk about setting up customer discovery research around your brand, differentiators, and positioning.
