The Vine

Here’s a fantstic video introducing Youngme Moon’s soon to be published Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd, which is described as “a book about realizing the true meaning of a word that has lost all meaning.” (An excerpt can be downloaded here.)

Dr. Moon is an award-winning Harvard business prof whose marketing courses are among the school’s most sought after. She makes a compelling argument that in many product categories, competitive differentiation no longer exists. Or, to be more precise, the distinctions are so nuanced and insubstantial that they’re no longer perceived by consumers.

Product proliferation has not led to product diversity, but rather the opposite: Sameness.

She writes, “[A]s the number of products within a category multiplies, the differences between them start to become increasingly trivial, almost to the point of preposterousness.” (Well of course our homes are different…our elevations are Northern Tuscan!)

When this happens, “[T]he category has reached the point where it is possible for product heterogeneity to be experienced as product homogeneity. Which is not to say that the distinctions between products are not real; it is simply to say that they are real only in the same way that synonyms have discrete connotations.”

Moon likens this to a competitive treadmill—a cycle wherein businesses are, unintentionally and unknowingly, running a race to nowhere.

“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.”

If the book is as thoughtful and insightful as its preview, it’s well worth ordering. I did.