Brand Strategy And The Paradox Of Different

In a world of ubiquitous choice in every product category, brands no longer compete with each other rather they seem to be melting in to each other. It’s time to rethink different in a world predisposed to sameness.

In category after category, the more brands strive for differentiation, the more alike they become. This is the paradox of different. Never in the course of human history has there been more abundant choice and consumption. There are more upgrades, add-ons, flavors and features between brands in a category that many have become indistinguishable in consumers minds.

The Rise Of The Category Connoisseur

In her provocative and quirky book Different–Escaping the Competitive Herd, Harvard Business School professor Youngme Moon describes how consumers navigate product categories and discern differences among brands within categories. She uses (to great effect) a low involvement category like breakfast cereal to illustrate the process. It goes something like this:

You’re standing in the middle of the breakfast cereal isle in your local grocery store. Your mission is to select a cereal you’ve never tried before–ideally one you will end up enjoying. How would you go about it?

If you were a breakfast cereal category connoisseur, you would simply walk down the isle instantly eliminating whole batches of cereal types from your consideration– kid’s cereals or anything with lots of sugar. You might begin to narrow your focus down to granolas or high fiber cereals. Maybe you would eliminate raisins or walnuts from the mix. Until you make your selection. The whole exercise would be over in less than a minute.

Consumers have learned to deconstruct a product category into sub categories and mini categories. Consumers, faced with overwhelming choice, have learned to make distinctions between various brands based on the smallest details of difference, and along the way become category connoisseurs. Before consumers can discern brand differences, they must be highly involved in the category.

On the other hand, if you were an alien from another planet, this simple task would prove nearly impossible. For this poor soul, ALL the cereals would appear to be pretty much the same. Why? Because where a connoisseur (category aware consumer) sees differences, the novice (unaware consumer) sees similarity. According to Moon, “connoisseurs can discern subtle differences based on nuanced asymmetries”, while a novice will lack the necessary filters to organize the assortment of choices in a relevant or meaningful way.

You could repeat this same exercise in any number of product categories with the same result. Try explaining to our aforementioned alien friend the difference between a Honda and a Toyota?  AT&T Wireless and Verizon? Wendy’s and Burger King? Coke and Pepsi, Crest and Colgate?

Yet as consumers, we take for granted how frequently we make purchase decisions among brands in the face of mind boggling, overflowing product profusion. For brands competing in a category, this reality has critical implications–especially in mature product categories where the number of alternatives has grown exponentially.  It’s a mistake to assume product proliferation within the category translates into product diversity. As the number of products grows in a category, the differences between them become trivial, almost meaningless.

The Emperor Has No Clothes And Everybody Knows it

The whole point of an effective brand strategy is to create relevant competitive advantage in a category. This is accomplished by having a value proposition that is highly valued and not in abundant supply. Yet with so much choice, it’s difficult to name a brand in any category that stands out for its uniqueness.

We now live in a brand landscape of dissimilar clones where imitation has become cloaked in the disguise of differentiation. Marketers still believe in the myth of competitive separation and advantage by function, features and rational benefits. They continue to imitate rather than innovate.

Meaningful Differentiation Is A Breakaway From Conventional Wisdom

Over time, consumer’s consumption patterns dictate the conventional wisdom of the category and what defines the functional reach of the products within that category. It’s easy to see why brands that fit neatly into the consumption pattern get to stay in the category. Thus contributing to the trivial differentiation that eventually becomes imitation.

To break free of the defining norms and innovate new meanings, brands have to breakaway and provide consumers with an expanded view or alternate frame of reference. Breaking away means letting go of the consumption pattern embedded into the category. Consumers must be complicit in this process for the magic to work.

A great example of a breakaway brand is Cirque du Soleil. It falls into the “circus” category, but this brand has skillfully crafted a highly valued and differentiated positioning as everything a circus is not. There are no tents, tigers and elephants. No ringmasters. Instead it borrows attributes from other entertainment categories like, dance, music, opera and theater. It becomes something all together different–far outside the bounds of a conventional circus.

Breakaway brands bring new meanings to the party and make the most of the stretch, holding on to enough of the old to avoid category defection. Breakaway brands stretch the boundaries and live as outliers. These brands are the opposite of the well-behaved brands in the category and consequently provide radical differentiation from the status quo.

Breakaway brands challenge the conventional patterns of consumption in the category by proposing new patterns to consumers they would not normally apply in that specific context. In essence, these brands provide the very thing consumers were waiting for, just not asking for.

To break the paradox of different, brands must become the exception in their category and not the rule.

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