Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

A posted declaration such as “I couldn’t live without my caffeine and my Converse All-Stars,” is seldom as offhand as it appears. Indeed, when it comes to the performance art known as social networking, it can sometimes feel as if there’s nothing but marketing going on—people playing publicist, working for themselves.

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.

The idea brands that I’m going to introduce you to represent the teardown approach; they offer a whole-scale rethinking of the value proposition in their respective categories. What this means is that they owe their existence to no insignificant amount of conceptual inspiration. Someone, somewhere, had to actually sit down and imagine what a radica

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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