Differentiation Strategy (and the Sea of Sameness) (opens in new tab)

For young companies, most advisors love to tell you, "Find out what your competition is doing and copy it. They must be doing it right and they already did the work for you." I cannot tell you how many times I heard that... and from top people too. To start, that may be true to a certain extent, but it can only get you so far as you mentioned. Plus, you started your company to fit a market need that was not being addressed, so celebrate that need and your ability to address it. Competing on differentiation is the only way to actually sustain a new business. Also, I like the Tesla shout out. They constantly look to differentiate any way they can. Great article. Lots of great information.

"It’s not enough to be just a little bit different. The differentiation needs to be big enough to tilt the decision in your favor.

Adding words like “robust” to your email marketing software description won’t do much."

Unfortunately, that's how most of us do it - afraid to be different but still afraid to look as everyone else.

So much value from just one article.

Author here. I spent the last winter studying differentiation - reading every book on the topic I could find (surprisingly little has been written about it), discussing it with people, thinking about it constantly.

The article is a summary of this work. Happy to answer any questions.

Liked the category creation part. Many of the most succesful products (not the first ones) created their own category so much that sometimes even their brand name serves as a category name today.

This spoke to me "Marketing is a game of attention. If you do what everyone else is doing, it’s hard to get it"

lots of psychology experiments speak to the fact that very different is good at attracting attention, but people usually convert/engage/choose what's familiar. How does your premise adjust for this known effect?