Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

18 min readFeb 3, 2019

Book 4 of 52 in the Mitch’s Notes Project

Why This Book?

I recommend this book for two reasons.

First, the books I have read to this point have been silver bullets. They were the silver bullet to solve your positioning (22 Immutable Laws) or branding (20 Principles that Drive Success) problems. This book doesn’t claim to be the end, but a work in progress. And unlike The Book of Why this book is directly relevant to entrepreneurship.

Second, it will inspire you to think differently. Steve Jobs said it best when he launched Apple’s Think Different marketing campaign.

To me marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world. It’s a very noisy world and we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.

This book will help you think about what you want people to remember about your brand and how that positions you in the market. This book will inspire you to rise above the noise of competitors. In the Author’s own words:

I wrote this book because I believe that what most of us are looking for today is a sound more resonant. A sound more meaningful. A vibration that we are able to experience, in our bones, as being somehow … different. And so that is what this book is about: It is an exploration of what it means for a business to commit to giving us this. It is an exploration of what it means for a business to decide to be different.

About the Author:

You should buy the book HERE.

According to her Harvard Business School Bio: Professor Moon’s research sits at the intersection of strategy, branding innovation, and culture, with a particular focus on youth and the digital economy. She is the author of the bestselling book, Different, and she has published and sold more than two million case studies on companies ranging from Starbucks to IKEA to Uber. She currently co-hosts a weekly podcast, After Hours, presented by Harvard Business Review.

Category: Marketing; Positioning and Branding

Mitch’s Summary

This book has a marked consumer products bent. It is obvious, however, that the lessons are directly transferable to technology companies and beyond.

What Questions Does the Book Answer or Inspire You to Ask?

Is your business and industry suffering from heterogeneous homogeneity, dissimilar clones, or imitation instead of differentiation? (Part 1)
Do you value excellence (lopsidedness) over parity (well-roundedness)? (Chapter 1)
Where do your company and your industry sit on the hedonic treadmill? (Chapter 2)
Is your industry hyper-mature? And if so how do you think about segmenting that market?(Chapter 3)
How have companies achieved true competitive separation in the past? What insights and lessons do they teach you that you can apply to your business? (Part 2)
Can your company create competitive differentiation by removing features customers have grown accustomed to? (Chapter 5)
What category or frame of reference do customers use to classify you company? Could you present them with an alternative frame of reference create a new subcategory or an entirely new category? (Chapter 6)
Could your company benefit by playing hard to get? Could you create create demand and competitive differentiation by culling your potential customer base? (Chapter 7)
Are you trying to compete? Or are you trying to separate? How can the topics above be used to reinforce one another? (Chapter 8)
What creative processes could you test to discover true competitive differentiation? How could these processes improve the chances of an extraordinary outcome for your business? (Part 3)
How can you challenge your traditional thinking about your company’s marketing function? (Chapter 9)
What is your competitive mindset? What are the common characteristics of brands that can escape the competitive herd? (Chapter 10)

Where Should You Start?

Start by remembering these immutable laws:

The Law of the Opposite — If you’re shooting for second place, your strategy is determined by the leader. Don’t try to be better, try to be different.
The Law of the Mind — It’s better to be first in the mind than to be first in the marketplace. Once a mind is made up, it rarely, if ever, changes.
The Law of Perception — Marketing is not a battle of products, it’s a battle of perceptions. There is no objective reality. There are no facts. There are no best products. All that exists in the world of marketing are perceptions in the minds of the customer or prospect. Perception is the reality.
The Law of the Category — If you can’t be first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in. Everyone is interested in what’s new. Few people are interested in what’s better. When you’re the first in new category, promote the category
The Law of Line Extension — There’s an irresistible pressure to extend the equity of the brand. More is less and less is more. If you want to be successful today you have to narrow the focus in order to build a position in the prospect’s mind.

Then remember what Aaker said about branding differentiation: We know from dozens of studies of new offerings that meaningful differentiation is the single highest correlate of market success. To succeed the offering MUST be both innovative and have a convincing story.

In sum:

Don’t try to be better, try to be different
Focus. More is less and less is more
Establish the differences in the customers mind and make it their reality
Create your own category with innovation and storytelling

This book will help you think about the first step in that process. It will help you improve each successive step. The culmination of this process is a story. And the best storyteller wins:

“The mistake people make is thinking the story is just about marketing. No, the story is the strategy. If you make your story better, you make the strategy better.” Ben Horowitz

This book will help you think critically about the differentiated story you want to tell. And the better story you tell, the better history you will write.

A Preview

Part 1: One of the theses of this book is that in category after category, it has become apparent that competitive differentiation is a myth. Or to put it more precisely, in category after category, companies have gotten so collectively locked into a particular cadence of competition that they appear to have lost sight of their mandate — which is to create meaningful grooves of separation from one another. Consequently, the harder they compete, the less differentiated they become. Which is to say that they have become masters of a particular form of imitation. Not differentiation,but imitation . Yet because this particular form of imitation is cloaked in the vernacular of differentiation, the myth of competitive separation lives on in the minds of the managers running these firms . Meanwhile, the emperor has no clothes and most consumers know it .
Part 2: will read very much like a celebration, of these iconoclasts and their ways of doing business…to deconstruct and demystify what they’ve accomplished in a manner that makes their achievements accessible to the rest of us. As a percentage, the number of companies who are truly able to achieve competitive separation in their respective categories — to break through the noisy clutter, to create genuine emotional resonance with consumers — is depressingly small, and yet these outliers have much to teach us about the limitations of some of our most deeply held business assumptions.
Part 3: We need to develop new habits, new disciplines, and new conventions around the exercise of competition. Most important, we need to build a new culture of competitive engagement that creates, at the very least, the possibility that an extraordinary outcome may emerge.

Chapter 1 — The Herd Instinct

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.
This, then, is the problem with uniform systems of measurement: The more entrenched a system of measurement, the more difficult it is for a deviant, an outlier, or even an experimenter to emerge. Another way to say this is to say that a competitive metric, any competitive metric, tends to bring out the herd in us. The dynamic can be likened to the observer effect in physics, only applied with too little foresight: The act of measurement changes the behavior of the thing being measured.
There is a cost to differentiation. There is a price to be paid for excellence, in anything. A college that emphasizes great teaching isn’t necessarily going to have the best research facilities . A tennis player with a great serve — and — volley game isn’t necessarily going to have the best ground strokes. Consumers don’t always understand this. This is why, if you’re looking for a compromise solution, then yes — take a poll, conduct some research, survey the people. But if you’re looking for a unique solution, the last thing you should do is ask for a vote.

The truth of the matter is, true differentiation — sustainable differentiation — is rarely a function of well-roundedness; it is typically a function of lopsidedness. The same can be said for excellence.
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.
The critical question comes down to whether in a given situation there is value in diversity, in the emergence of multiple divergent outcomes.

Chapter 2 — The Paradox of Progress

To be a parent is to be the caretaker of your children’s past and future at an age when they cannot possibly fathom that either matters.
Again, in both types of augmentation [augmentation-by-addition and augmentation-by-multiplication], the objective is the same: to make the product better, in either a cumulative or a reproductive fashion.
The “hedonic treadmill;” the term was dead on in describing the human predisposition to feel entitled to today what we used to feel thankful for yesterday. What’s amusing about so many of the studies on hedonic adaptation is that they demonstrate the extent to which our propensity to become spoiled is, from an evolutionary perspective, practically a foregone conclusion.

A company augments its value proposition by offering consumers a new benefit.
Customers are pleased.
Competitors race to match (imitate) the augmentation.
The augmentation becomes standard across the category.
Satisfaction levels are recalibrated, which is to say that customers now feel entitled to what they were grateful for yesterday.
Meanwhile, the expected value proposition has expanded and the minimal requirements for competing in the category have gone up.
Repeat step 1.

It used to be the case that change happened slowly and steadily, with one advance carefully laying the foundation for the next. But in an increasing number of industries, change now happens quickly and indiscriminately, in such a way that the cumulative sum of those augmentations doesn’t seem to pay out much at all. In my mind, this is the mark of a category that has lost its discipline.
The paradox of progress is that it makes things better, until it makes things worse.
So if I have one piece of advice for you, for the time being, anyway, it is this. Play the story backward and play the story forward. Rewind, fast — forward, last year, next year. And try to envision your market through the lens of alternative future possibilities.

Chapter 3 — The Category Blur (How We Cope)

You could even boil down the entire function of marketing to this — the process by which businesses try to make us picky about what we consume. The process itself is marked by a set of complex business tactics, sure, but the objective itself is remarkably straightforward.

In sum , when these two ingredients — passion and comparative expertise — yield a particular brand preference, they become tenacious in their combination for the express reason that they add up to a sense of irreplaceability. If you’re a brand manager, this is precisely what you want — people who not only love your brand but feel that it’s the only brand able to deliver what they’re looking for.

Once the dual dynamics of competitive herding and competitive hyper — activity begin to dominate a category, the category itself starts to become incompatible with brand devotion. I really believe this to be true. This is what I mean when I say that brand loyalty is becoming harder to come by. What I’m saying is that when I look around me, I see too many firms in too many categories engaged in precisely the kind of competitive cycle that tends to preclude its emergence.
This is the second thing that happens when a category reaches hyper — maturity : Consumption becomes a window into how we feel about a category per se, irrespective of the intramural jockeyings of the brands within…In this post , it is the category affiliations that matter , not the brand affiliations .

A different framework for segmenting customers in hyper mature markets:

Category connoisseurs — affection for the category
Savvy opportunists — category expert bargain hunters
Pragmatics — indifferent category participation
Reluctants — participate in the category when they have no other choice
Brand Loyalists — stubborn passion for a particular brand

Chapter 4 — Escaping the Herd

The brands that make me sit up and pay attention are exactly these: Brands that are able to entice people out of their entrenched consumption patterns. Brands that are able to make pragmatics and indifferents want to go the extra mile to buy their brand. Brands that are able to turn reluctants into enthusiasts, opportunists into loyalists.
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.
They thus serve as exemplars of the thesis I’ve offered from the start — that the way to think about differentiation is not as the offspring of competition, but as escape from competition altogether.

There are big chunks of the business core that are simply broken. The most obvious manifestation of this is what I have described as a monolithic competitive her . The silver lining in this is that there is now a window of opportunity for outliers to emerge; after all, in order for there to be a rebel, there must first be an establishment against which to rebel. And so, much as cartoons derive their power from their contrast to live action, what I hope you’ll see is that idea brands derive their power from the very thing they are attempting to subvert. 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.

Part 2 — No Contest (Celebration)

Chapter 5 — Reversal

Google has become such a routinized part of our daily regimen that it’s easy to forget how stunning it was in its earliest incarnation. Stunning, not for what it did, but for what it didn’t do. As a late entry into the portal game, Google’s homepage wasn’t just simple, it was stripped — down, it was naked, it was a downright vacuum of information. Whereas Yahoo! offered an ocean, Google offered a blank slate. Its homepage consisted of a single element: a text — entry box with a search button.
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.
A reverse — positioned firm is one that refuses to get on the augmentation treadmill, not because it doesn’t care about its customers, but because it is operating under an inverse assumption — that given the hyper — maturity of the category, there are probably lots of folks out there who are over — satisfied, i.e ., who are being given an inflated set of benefits they don’t necessarily care about. This assumption then serves as a motivator to streamline the value proposition, as opposed to further inflate it.
This is what makes IKEA a reverse brand: It gives us something less, but it gives us something more, too. It smoothly combines elements that we aren’t accustomed to seeing together.

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 feel grateful for its absence. Less is more only when more has become a commodity.

Chapter 6 — Breakaway

Companies that introduce breakaway brands recognize that when it comes to consumption, our classifications tend to be both superficial and arbitrary. But they also recognize that these classifications mediate our consumption experiences in profound ways. And so they deliberately intervene in our process of classification, offering us an alternative category rubric to replace our default one.
This, in a nutshell, is what breakaway brands are: They’re transformative devices. By presenting us with an alternative frame of reference, they encourage us to let go of the consumption posture we’re inclined to bring to a product and embrace entirely new terms of engagement instead. In order for the breakaway to strike the proper chord, we have to “buy” into the recategorization. This is why a critical ingredient in all of this is transparency. [and this is why category building is important]

If there is a lesson in this chapter, it is that in business, our category boundaries are neither immutable nor sacrosanct; they are flexible, changeable, pliant to the extreme. All it takes is a perceptual shift to enact a product redefinition. All it takes is a perceptual shift to transform the consumption posture of an army of consumers.

When you witness the birth of a breakaway brand , you are often witnessing the birth of an entirely new subcategory, one that is likely to alter the complexion of that industry well beyond the next business cycle .

This, then, is what I mean when I say that breakaway brands succeed in transforming their industries. They leave their imprint by expanding product definitions, by stretching category boundaries, and by forcing competitors to play catch — up for years to come.

Chapter 7 — Hostility

This is a chapter about hostile brands. Hostile brands are brands that play hard to get. Instead of laying down the welcome mat, they lay down a gauntlet…In this regard, hostile brands don’t market in the classical sense of the term; they anti — market.
This, to put it plainly, is what hostile brands do: They refuse to play the game of persuasion in its old — school form. They say the things that other brands won’t say, the things that risk chasing us away…They tend to be refreshingly blunt, brazenly challenging us with the unflinching directness of their message.

Hostile brands tell us exactly what we’re in for, and if we don’t like it, they’re the first to show us the door. This is why I’ll often use the term “anti — marketing” to describe them: These are “take it or leave it” brands. They refuse to pander, they refuse to kowtow, they refuse to even consider the possibility of modifying the product to sand away the rough edges .

When we are surrounded by conformity, by homogeneity, we all look for ways to create a little chafe. To set ourselves apart, just a little bit. This is what hostile brands do: They flourish in the dramatic possibilities of polarization. They feed off the friction…These are luxury brands of the non — monetary type, in which the equity of ownership becomes a function of the figurative price.

Chapter 8 — Difference

When it comes to the unity of opposites, in other words, it’s all about the balance. Similarity is stasis; difference is motion. And if the two happen to exist in dynamic equilibrium, everything is right in the world. We feel grounded, but we feel stimulated, too.
Idea brands don’t try to compete. That is the key. They are more interested in separation than comparison. And so regardless of whether they engage us or enrage us, these are the brands that make us mindful again.

[Apple shows that] the concepts of reversal, breakaway and hostility can be mutually reinforcing, and even synergistic at times. In addition, the brand’s persistent magnetism is yet another reminder, against a sea of competitive homogeneity, of how utterly charismatic difference can be.

What I like about the examples of Dove [real beauty not supermodel beauty] and Harley [H.O.G riding groups] is that they are two brands that created difference, but in diametrically different ways. Dove created difference by debunking fantasy; Harley created difference by nurturing it. And although neither fits neatly into my brand typology, that only underscores my point:

Difference can’t be concocted using preexisting parameters. What we consider to be different depends on what we consider to be the norm. In fact, trying to define what is different is like trying to define what is opposite — the definition lacks content absent the context. This is why a framework — any framework — will never capture any more than a fragment of the potential difference out there.

This has several implications.

First, it implies that the best way to locate difference is to simply look for it.
Second, it implies that there are countless ways to be different.
Finally, it implies that although there are lots of ways to be different, not all of these ways are going to be created equal.

There are two kinds of difference. There is a kind of difference that says nothing, and there is a kind of difference that speaks volumes.

Part 3 — The Human Touch (Reflection)

Chapter 9 — Marketing Myopia, Revisited

I have attempted to adhere to two deeply held convictions throughout. The first is the idea that there can be value in the skew. The second is the idea that there can be value in provocation, a kind of value that is distinct from the value delivered by a set of hard — and — fast business prescriptions.

In business, differentiation is everything; we all know this…And yet the instant we put our business hats back on, we are back to speaking the formal language of differentiation. As if we’re not aware of any disconnect, as if we’re not aware that there is a chasm between the way we talk about our brands and the way people experience them.

One of the reasons that this is happening, I believe, is that we have gotten stuck in a self — defeating cycle of competition. Or, to put it more forcefully, our competitive competence is killing us.
Our competitive myopia has spawned a second, related problem as well: It has created a dynamic in which our tendency to mirror (or better yet, to one — up) the movements of our competitors has started to become reflexive.

When consumers look at the brands within a particular category, more often than not, all they see is a competitive blur. The objective is not to blend into the blur; the objective is to stand out from it. This is what it means to be different.

If we want to build organizations in which innovation happens, we need to create environments in which we are comfortable suspending our disbelief enough to let it happen.

Idea brands are not perfect brands. Far from it. They are polarizing brands. They are lopsided brands. They are brands that are devoted to the skew. But because they do such an exquisite job of capturing our contradictions, they end up teaching us lessons about the inadequacies of our reductionist tools, lessons that they play back to us in fabulous style.

Chapter 10 — Sign-Off

Differentiation is a way of thinking. It’s a mindset. It’s a commitment. A commitment to engage with people — not in a manner to which they are merely unaccustomed, but in a manner that they will value, respect, and yes, perhaps even celebrate.

I wanted to write this book because I believe that there will always be a muddied herd in business — in every category, in every industry, an indistinguishable cluster of brands moving in lockstep with one another — but at the same time I believe there will always be exceptions, too.
The first characteristic that I think these brands will share is that they will offer something that is hard to come by. Historically, the best way for a business to provide value has always been to offer something that is hard to come by. Scarcity always whets demand.they are mindful of what we have in abundance, and then they tender us something that is scarce. Remember : Restraint can be the new desire. A whisper can be the new shout. If there is one thing I feel pretty sure about, it is that there will always be a place for brands offering something that is hard to come by.
The second characteristic that I think these brands will share is that they will reflect a commitment to a big idea. Which is to say that they won’t just be different in a little way, they will be different in a big way. Difference is deviance. Difference is permutation. Difference is a commitment to the unprecedented, which is another way of saying it is a commitment to letting go.
The third characteristic that I think these brands will share is that they will be intensely human. Which is to say that they will have been conceived by individuals who are acutely sensitive to the complexities of the human spirit.
Differentiation is not a tactic. It is a way of thinking. It is a mindset, a mindset that comes from listening and observing and absorbing and respecting. Most of all, it is a commitment. A commitment to engage with people in a manner that reveals to them that, yes, we get it.