Reverse benchmarking
Reverse benchmarking is studying what the leaders in your field do badly and doing that conspicuously well, instead of copying what they do well.
How it works
Everyone benchmarks against the strengths of the best, which is why those strengths are already everywhere and worth nothing as a difference. The unoccupied ground is the things the leaders do merely adequately, because they never looked worth the effort. A restaurant team sent to the best place in the world was told to note only what it did poorly, came back with coffee and beer, and hired a specialist for each. The wider claim is that copying the leader degrades the whole category by removing the differences that made any of it worth choosing.
What it changes for a personal brand
List what everyone in your field does adequately and nobody does well: the follow-up, the first ten seconds, the thing they send afterwards. Pick one and be disproportionately good at it. It is unoccupied precisely because it never looked like a priority.