I have increasingly come to think that unique value propositions and differentiators, as they appear in most strategy documents, are vacuous. Differentiation does exist and it matters enormously, but the place where it actually comes from is so structural, so internal to the organization, that any attempt to compress it into a line vitiates the very thing it purports to capture. 

The world today metabolizes and commoditizes everything, ruthlessly. Whatever you can articulate clearly enough to put in a deck, a competitor can read, internalize, and approximate within a quarter or two. 

There are no durable public-facing moats anymore. 

And incoherence, when it exists, surfaces fast now. Everyone is on social media. Every employee, every customer, every peripheral observer has a voice and some kind of audience. The gap between what a company claims to be and what it actually does is legible to even the most cursory observer, and someone will always spot it. A brand that contradicts its own media footprint is just compounding the damage with every press cycle.

Of course, I do not mean to say formidable differentiations don’t exist. But real, enormous capability differences need no explanation! Alex Honnold doesn’t have a differentiator slide. Magnus Carlsen doesn’t need to tell you he’s good at chess. When the gap is that wide, the whole language of competitive positioning just looks silly and falls away. This kind of differentiation is almost trivial to identify because it’s just extreme performance on a measurable axis. 

But the kind of differentiation I’m trying to describe here is harder to name precisely because it doesn’t live on any single axis at all. It’s relational. It’s structural. It’s the accumulation of how you show up across hundreds of small interactions that individually seem insignificant but collectively produce a feeling in the customer that they can’t fully articulate either. They just know they’d rather work with you. They renew without shopping around. They refer you without being asked. And if you asked them why, they’d probably say something vague like “they just get it” or “they’re easy to work with”, which is the most consequential thing anyone will ever say about you in the fewest possible syllables.

This kind of differentiation is doubly invisible. It’s invisible to the customer in the sense that they feel it but can’t name it. And it’s invisible to competitors in the sense that they can see your product, your pricing, your design, your marketing, and still not understand why customers prefer you. It doesn’t show up in any public artifact they can study. It lives entirely in the texture of the relationship. A competitor could read everything you’ve ever published about yourself and still not be able to replicate it, because they’d have to reconstitute a half-decade of your specific decisions under your specific constraints with your specific people. That’s not transferable. You cannot put it in a line.

And I think this is also the kind of differentiation that a UVP most catastrophically fails to capture. Because if you try to write it down — “we treat our customers like partners” or “we take accountability seriously” — it immediately sounds like the blandest possible marketing copy. Every company says that. The difference is that some companies actually do it, consistently, under pressure, when it costs them something. And that consistency over time is what produces the differentiation. The saying and the doing are almost opposite signals. 

So this kind of differentiation is emergent and irreducibly endogenous. It’s not something you can enshrine in a manifesto on day one and then march inexorably toward. It accretes over time, through thousands of decisions made under constraint, most of which weren’t made with differentiation in mind at all: who you hired, what you built, how you spoke, what you stood for, how you responded to unforeseen calamities, how you treated your people, what your people will sacrifice and what they’ll quit over, will they work weekends to ship something they believe in, what product decisions they’d fight for at the table and what they’d let slide without a word. You can’t plan for any of that in advance. You can only discern the gestalt it produced in retrospect. 

The UVP and USP aren’t entirely useless, though. As they exist in positioning documents, they are good for short-term messaging. Sales copy. Cold email. In that context, their remit is circumscribed and defensible; they get someone curious enough to keep talking. They don’t need to be structurally true in some deep sense, they just need to be directionally accurate and resonant enough to open a door. I have no problem with that! The problem is when it metastasizes from the sales deck into the strategy document and gets treated as foundational, as if naming the differentiation were the same thing as having it.

Positioning documents themselves aren’t useless, obviously. But their actual value is pretty much the opposite of how people treat them. A good positioning doc makes the org say out loud what it believes, what it’s deliberately not doing, where disagreement is festering under verbal consensus. It’s a surface for productive conflict. People get to point at the parts they think are wrong, the trade-offs they refuse to swallow, the places where they think the strategy is broken. That friction is the signal. 

The UVP section, by contrast, exists to foreclose that disagreement. It forces premature consensus on exactly the question that most needs to stay open. And it’s almost always written last, as a summary of material that’s already been sanded down through successive redactions: a compression of a compression. By the time it’s a single line, whatever was genuinely contested is long gone. What’s left is a sentence that everyone can live with, which is another way of saying a sentence that’s full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.