Death by Differentiation
January 19th, 2008 by Dominic Canterbury
Ever since marketing great Jack Trout wrote Differentiate or Die, businesses have fallen over themselves to adopt the religion of differentiation. They want to look different, sound different, act different, and generally push the creative envelope to chart new territories in search of difference.
The problem is, difference, in and of itself, counts for nothing.
“Yeah right,” you might be saying. “Nobody ever won the marketing game by being the same.”
How very true, but here’s where the thinking goes all screwey. Most people seem to think of it this way:
“Better things are different, therefore different things are better.”
As you can see, that’s just plain loopy.
It’s true that without differentiation you will die, but you’ll also die if you just differentiate willy-nilly without strategy and purpose.
Well said Dominic. It’s taken me a very very long time to understand “niche” partly because it felt like different for the sake of different.
DrD
Those of us in business can truly appreciate this. For some of us we’ve realized exactly what you’ve said.. being different isn’t good enough. You’ve got to have purpose and a direction, otherwise you will be different, just the same different as your competition.