A cosmetic dentist came to us with a seemingly straightforward assignment: help rewrite his website.
On the surface, there was plenty to work with. He had decades of experience. He had impressive credentials and industry recognition. His practice offered high-end cosmetic dentistry in Los Angeles, a market where beautiful smiles are practically a competitive category of their own.
But he didn’t want his practice to sound like every other dentist in LA.
Our client’s request meant we couldn’t rely on the expected vocabulary: “Hollywood smile,” “red-carpet results,” “perfect teeth,” “luxury dentistry.” Those phrases might describe the category, but they didn’t explain what made his practice different.
So we had to get to know our client.
The difference wasn’t just what he did. It was how he saw his work.
As we dug deeper into this dentist’s business, which he had started with his husband, we discovered that his practice had a much more interesting story than its initial brief suggested.
Our client’s practice was built on his belief that dentistry could be fundamentally different from the clinical experience most people expect. He intentionally designed his practice around comfort, attentiveness, aesthetics, and personalization.
His and his husband’s story became an important part of understanding why the practice existed the way it did. That distinction changed the writing.
Instead of simply trying to make the practice sound “luxurious,” we could show what luxury meant to them: meticulous attention to detail, an unusually personal approach, an environment designed to put patients at ease, and cosmetic work that prioritized artistry and individuality over a one-size-fits-all version of perfection.
With this perspective, we weren’t just writing standard dentistry website copy.
We had a point of view.
That point of view became a lens for making decisions. What should the website emphasize? Which credentials matter? What stories should we tell? What language feels authentic? What should we leave out? What does the practice believe that its competitors don’t, or at least don’t express in the same way?
The answers became much easier once we knew what we were trying to say.
Your POV is your filter
This is the part many businesses miss.
They think differentiation means coming up with a clever tagline or finding a few words their competitors aren’t using.
But a meaningful point of view goes deeper than that.
It’s an opinion about your category. A belief about your customers. A particular way of doing things. A perspective that influences the choices you make as a business. And once you have it, your content gets easier. Your POV becomes a filter.
If a topic doesn’t support what you believe, you may not need to write about it. If a trend doesn’t fit your brand, you don’t have to chase it. If your competitors are all making the same claim, you have a framework for deciding whether you should make it too, or find a more distinctive way to tell the story.
Without that filter, content marketing can become an endless game of “What should we post this week?”
With it, the question becomes much more useful: What do we have to say about this?
Why is finding a difference so hard?
For one thing, businesses are often too close to their own story. What feels obvious to people inside a company can be incredibly valuable to an outsider. Meanwhile, teams can spend so much time looking at competitors that they start unconsciously adopting the language and positioning of the category.
There’s also a natural tendency to describe what a business does rather than what it believes.
“We provide cosmetic dentistry.”
“We offer strategic consulting.”
“We make enterprise software.”
All true. None particularly distinctive.
The harder, and more valuable work is figuring out what sits underneath those statements.
Why do you do it this way? What do you refuse to compromise on? What do you understand about your customer that others don’t? What do you want people to feel when they interact with your brand? What makes your approach meaningfully different?
Those questions are where a real POV starts to emerge.
Go From “What do we say?” to “What do we stand for?”
That’s the kind of thinking we explore in a MarketSmiths SPARK session.
A SPARK session is a strategy and messaging workshop designed to help marketing leaders and teams clarify what makes their organization different and, just as importantly, how to express that difference in a way that can actually guide their marketing.
The goal isn’t to manufacture a personality or invent differentiation that isn’t there.
It’s to uncover what’s already distinctive, put language around it, and turn it into something your team can use.
Once you know your angle, you don’t have to force every piece of content to be brilliant.
You just need to make sure it’s coming through the right lens. That lens can make the difference between content that fills a calendar and content that sounds unmistakably like you.
