Escaping the Competitive Herd

In her book expressively titled Different, Prof. Youngme Moon of Harvard Business School offers a refreshing insight into what makes some brands stand out as truly different. She argues that while companies understand they must differentiate, they compete head-on and unwittingly become more like each other. Feature-matching and product augmentation has the perverse effect of making a company similar to its competitors, not different.

Youngme Moon's book does not read like a business book - it rather is like talking to her, and understanding her views. You come away thinking that business is at its heart a profoundly human endeavor - urging us as businesspersons to focus on what makes people tick.

The book is organized in two parts. Part 1 is a critique of the herd and Part 2 is the celebration of those that rise above it.

When you ask consumers what they want, they will ask for what they are not getting, and their request will be driven by what competition is offering. Thus, market research has the perverse effect of driving your product to sameness. So Volvo drivers want sex appeal, Audi drivers want safety. A marketer's knee-jerk reaction is to round out the product by correcting weakness, rather than to  play to its strengths and make it stand out. So, well-meaning efforts to monitor your competitive position lead to homogenization.

Herd behavior demands very little of its participants. Don't collide with your neighbor, follow the general direction and speed, and drift in the average direction of nearby birds.

Product augmentation leads to competitors copying it, and the whole category is back to square one. It is an expensive way to commoditization. Now you have a hyper-mature category on your hands, where there is frenzied competitive hyper-activity, but slow overall growth. The customer satisfaction treadmill is ceaseless, and you are at a standstill.

Fortunately, there are exceptions to this. We live in a world where conformity reigns, but exceptions rule. Moon therefore celebrates a handful of brands that rise above the clutter - these are reverse brands, breakaway brands and hostile brands.

While other portals tried to cram as much content on their home pages as possible, Google competed by deleting all those things and making its start page really simple, focused on search. While furniture shops competed on the basis of durability, ease of purchase and shipping - IKEA did the opposite. IKEA made it plain that buyers need to haul the furniture themselves, assemble it at home, and the resulting ware would not necessarily survive a move. Yet, buyers flocked the shop for its ambiance, shopping experience, food, play areas for kids, excitement of assembling furniture and so forth. These are reverse brands.

When Sony created AIBO the household robot, in a stroke of genius they fashioned it as a pet. All of a sudden, AIBO's quirks were construed as a pet's idiosyncrasies, and customers loved the product. Cirque Du Soleil misses several key elements of a circus - the animals, the ringmaster and so forth. Yet, it calls itself precisely that - a circus, rather than position itself as a blend of theater, dance, opera. Why? Because CDS wants to position itself as a player in the category that is venturing out of bounds. Here, CDS is trying to redefine the category. Swatch, the bestselling watch brand in history, made watches into seasonal fashion accessories. These are breakaway brands. They challenge classifications. They offer alternate category rubrics in place of existing ones. That is why Kimberly Clark fashioned diapers as "Pull-Ups" and positioned away from diapers, and more as big-kid underpants.

When Red Bull excludes those consumers who don't like its taste, does not squash rumors about what it is manufactured from, and builds a fanatic follower base that spreads the word of mouth, you are witnessing a hostile brand. A hostile brand tells the consumers what they are in for, and if they don't like it, shows them the door - quickly. These are "take it or leave it" brands. They refuse to sand away the rough edges. Their attitude is - if Red Bull makes you nervous, don't drink it. They polarize. They summon resistance. MINI says loud and clear: The SUV backlash starts here.

Contrast these bravely positioned products with the countless breakfast cereals, detergents, family cars, laptops and many other categories where me-too competition has resulted in a category continuum to a point of  no differentiation - which by definition means the products are all but commoditized. Unless you are a category connoisseur, you cannot navigate the category, nor understand the differences.When product alternatives within a category explode, the differences become meaningless, the category attains heterogeneous homogeneity. The differences are there, but they are lost in a sea of sameness.

Youngme Moon has done a great service to marketing professionals, innovators and entrepreneurs by highlighting the idea brands that dare to be different.