what makes your brand remarkable?

My entrepreneurial endeavors started in babysitting and house cleaning. When I was twelve, I started with one house and one kid. I created itineraries filled with games and activities and cooked his favorite foods. Before long, I had five families that I sat for in my neighborhood.

One of the families had five kids. Most of the kids were older and just wanted to play video games and watch movies, and the youngest was really good at entertaining herself.

The house was really messy: dirty dishes in the sink, piles of clothes in every room and sticky gunk covered everything. I said to the mom, “I can clean your house while the kids watch a movie.” She looked at me with big eyes. “Well, of course. I’ll pay you to clean my house, too. Are you sure?” I was. It was the start of my sitting and house-cleaning venture. For $100 a night, I would watch your kids and then, when the kids went to sleep, I would clean your house. By the time I was thirteen, I was making good money.

Babysitting by itself wasn’t remarkable. Cleaning a house wasn’t remarkable, either. But doing them at the same time was something that no one else was doing. And I loved babysitting kids. I loved creating magical worlds with them and then seeing a parent’s relief when they came home to a clean house. Finding what makes you or your brand remarkable is sometimes hard to see.

This is the heart of the work we do with our clients at Novel. It is what gives us compelling campaigns, and it is how we write engaging stories. It is what helps inform our approach to paid digital marketing and is how we create videos.

Here are a few questions that might help you on your path of uncovering your remarkable:

1. If you are the founder, what about your background is unique, and how did that uniquely impact how you created your business/product/service?

2. What can you claim that your competitors can’t?

3. What do your customers say about their experience with you? Your product? Your service?

4. What about your product, service or approach is different from everyone else?

5. What are your values? How does this affect the way you do business? Is this unique in your industry?