The distinctive features of your brand: the brand driver model

Excelling in something does not guarantee success. Every brand tries to carve out its own place in the market. Not only in the market but also in the consumer’s mind. Successful brands are associated with something that makes them unique in their market.

The brand driver model by McKinsey is a useful tool to find the distinctive features that make your brand unique in the market. The model looks as follows:

The brand driver model

How can this model help you develop your brand identity? The first step is to put on paper everything your brand has to offer. What can you tell the market about your brand? Make a list and place these words in the quadrants of the model.

Antes
This quadrant contains the features that are important to your customers but with which you cannot possibly be distinctive in the market. The market expects your brand to have these features. An example of this is fast delivery when you start a webshop. As of 2018, this is a minimum requirement for a webshop.

Drivers
This is the most important quadrant. The features of your brand that are important to the target audience AND with which you can distinguish yourself from your competitors. These are the USPs of your brand that only you can offer. Your brand identity must be based on these features.

Distinctions
This contains the features that are distinctive from the competition but not relevant to the customer. This quadrant is related to the aforementioned market research. Innovative communication expressions in an extremely conservative market make no sense and will not gain you customers. You will stand out negatively compared to other providers because customers simply want to have a familiar and ‘certain’ feeling when making their purchase.

Neutrals
Neutrals are features that are neither distinctive nor relevant to your customer. These features are so generic that they have lost all impact.

Based on this model, you can really get to work with your brand identity. Describe how you can translate the distinctive features into visual and textual elements. Want to know what components your brand identity consists of and how to shape it? Take a look at our brand identity page.