Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

When a category has reached the point when it’s possible to make fun of the people who still believe in the differences across products, it has reached the point of what I refer to as heterogeneous homogeneity: The differences are there, but they are lost in a sea of sameness.

Negative trade-offs are not only a marker of excellence, they are a marker of differentiation. This is as true for products and brands as it is for brain surgeons.

This can be a dangerous inflection point in the life cycle of a category: when the proportion of comparative differentiators to non-differentiators starts to shift direction. Now, the category is composed of a shrinking number of devotees who are focused on differences that seem almost idiosyncratic, along with a growing number of customers who are

In fact, if I had to identify the secret of IKEA’s appeal, here’s what I’d say: IKEA is a brand that has discovered the cool of unapologetic contradiction. It is stingy; it is indulgent. It says yes; it says no. It strips things down; it sweetens things up. It has stumbled upon a dialectic, and it has somehow figured out how to make that dialectic

And so the reverse brand tries to concoct an unlikely brew, consisting of something less, but something more, too. It looks to create a symbiosis of elements that we’ve been trained to believe don’t belong together. The idea is to be an oxymoron, and an agreeable one at that.

This is what reverse brands do: They take away what we expect, but then give us what we don’t. They say no where others say yes, but they also say yes where others say no. The result is a value proposition that feels almost “inside-out” to us.

One of the easiest ways to acquire connoisseurship is through immersion. If every day were declared to be Halloween, it wouldn’t be long before we would all be authorities on candy. Easier still is to be introduced to a product category when it is at a relatively young age. The reason for this is that product categories tend to unfold in a cumulati

In some strange respects, then, the companies that I am about to present to you can be thought of this way—as palliatives that owe their existence to the disease.

The act of measurement changes the behavior of the thing being measured.

The minute we choose to measure something, we are essentially choosing to aspire to it. A metric, in other words, creates a pointer in a particular direction. And once the pointer is created, it is only a matter of time before competitors herd in the direction of that pointer.