Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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