Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

These are the brands that I’m inclined to pay the most attention to: the ones that treat our expectations as nothing more than straw men. They recognize that the challenge is to render our expectations irrelevant in the context of what else they are offering, and so they take it upon themselves to offer us an alternative reality to our established

And yet it would be a mistake to assume that product proliferation begets product diversity. On the contrary, as the number of products within a category multiplies, the differences between them start to become increasingly trivial, almost to the point of preposterousness.

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

Reverse brands create a kind of tilt in the surface—of progress, of evolution, of expectation. They draw us down a divergent path by applying pressure in exactly the place where we least anticipate it.

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

In a saturated world, there can be a fresh appreciation for the elimination of benefits, as long as that elimination is thoughtfully executed. When people are accustomed to having too much, they will luxuriate in the absence of things they’ve come to take for granted.

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

What this implies is that when it comes to our consumption preferences, what we want tomorrow is probably going to be informed by what we have too much of today. It is only when we are drowning in choices that we are going to feel liberated when someone takes them away. It’s only when we’re feeling suffocated by customer service that we’re going to

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.