Imagine you’re launching a new AI writing tool to a very crowded market. You’re up against established players like Jasper, Copy.AI, Grammarly, Simplified, and Frase, all competing for a similar audience of professional writers.
You need a way to stand out as the obvious option (without directly saying, “They suck, pick us.”).
Your answer: Pick a strength that makes you look good while making your competitors look bad, and build your brand strategy around it. Or, as Scott calls it, laddering.
In today’s post, we’ll explain how to use laddering to deposition your competitors, using one of my favorite AI case studies right now, Writer.
Want to learn Brand Strategy from the laddering guru himself, Prof G? Sign up for membership with coupon code LADDERING for 25% off, and get unlimited access to all our courses.
How to use laddering to deposition your competition
Laddering (as defined by Scott Galloway) means highlighting your strengths in a way that inherently points out your competitor’s weaknesses.
In other words:
- “Apple believes in privacy as a human right.” [Whereas Google and Facebook are stealing your data].
- “Bluesky is decentralized and transparent.” [Whereas Twitter/X is controlled by a tyrannical wackjob].
- “RXBar is made with no ‘bad stuff.’” [Whereas Clif bars have a list of ingredients you can’t even pronounce.]
Laddering is particularly important when you operate in a crowded market, with competitors that are delivering a similar product or service. You may not be able to differentiate on your standard product features – Apple and Samsung phones are pretty similar at this point, as are X and Bluesky’s platforms.
Instead, you need to find a strength that:
- Your competitor doesn’t share
- Your competitor is known for not sharing
- Your customer cares about a lot
Once you have that, you repeat that strength over and over again to cement in your customers’ minds that you’re the obvious option.
3 steps to build your laddering strategy
- STEP 1: Write down a list of your company’s strengths.
- STEP 2: Cross off strengths that aren’t differentiated (aka, your competitor shares them).
- STEP 3: Cross off strengths that aren’t relevant (aka, your customer doesn’t care about them).
You should end up with a short list of strengths that you can use to deposition your competitor. If you have to choose between two or three, ask yourself:
Which of these weaknesses is my competitor most known for?
If your competitor is Salesforce, maybe it’s difficulty-of-use. If your competitor is Bombas, maybe it’s cost per pair of (amazing) socks.
How Writer makes every other AI writing tool look unsecure
My favorite example of laddering right now is Writer, the enterprise-grade AI writing tool.
There are a ton of different AI tools for writing on the market, and most of them share a similar value prop – high-quality content generation, fast.
Writer has a different approach. Their messaging is focused on a strength that’s very important to their customers, and where many tools don’t measure up: enterprise-grade data privacy.
If you look at their homepage, Writer has built their messaging around this differentiator. In the first scroll alone, enterprise data privacy and security is mentioned 10 times.
- “Enterprise generative AI”
- “Secure full-stack platform”
- “Secure, private, and completely Writer-built”
- “Built on secure, enterprise-grade LLMs”
- “We don’t rely on third-party, black-box models”
- “LLMs that never use your data for training and can be self-hosted”
Jasper and Copy.AI may have robust enterprise security practices, but they don’t mention them until far below the fold.
Reading both pages, an enterprise team lead would probably assume that Writer takes their security more seriously – especially when they’ve been told repeatedly that AI data privacy is a top priority.
Copy.AI’s security value prop is about nine scrolls down the page:
Want to stand out in a crowded market? Zero in on a strength that your competitors can’t copy, and make it the tentpole of your messaging. And if you have examples, share them with me – I love to see it in the wild.
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Want to learn Brand Strategy from the laddering guru himself, Prof G? Sign up for membership with coupon code LADDERING for 25% off.
