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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 yet in too many cases, this is what business has been reduced to: the artful packaging of meaningless distinctions as true differentiation.

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.

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.