All posts tagged: differentiation

Telling

By Mark Di Somma

What gives you the right to sell a product/service at margin today? It’s easy to assume you have a mandate. Or that you deserve one. But what is your brand doing to earn/retain the mandate it wants/has? Don’t tell me it’s because you opened. Because presence isn’t enough. Don’t tell me you worked hard to get here (past tense). Because then you’re relying on your history. Don’t tell me you’re doing a good job. Because most everyone’s doing a good job. Ditto service, people, methodologies, products, channels, technologies, systems, processes, efficiencies … for most companies anyway. Talk perhaps about the scarcity of what you offer, or the richness of the ideas that you encourage, or the loyalty you forge, or the need you are meeting that your competitors don’t, or the insights you’ve developed and applied that are truly valuable, or the excitement you generate, or the journey you’re taking people on, or how you are looking to generate the most wonderful change … Better yet talk about how you’re combining ideas and where that’s …

The Feynman principle

By Mark Di Somma

A review of a review about scientist Richard Feynman in the Freakonomics blog caught my eye this morning because it also provides a simple but telling thought for every brand owner. The author of the blog post, Sanjoy Mahajan, comments “It’s not quite true that Feynman could not accept an idea until he had torn it apart. Rather, the idea could not yet be part of his way of thinking and looking at the world. Before an idea could contribute to that worldview, Feynman wanted to turn over the idea, to see why it was true, from any angle that he could find.” We don’t have to look far to see what Feynman was fighting against. Once something has been widely accepted as fact, the temptation is to absorb it unquestioned and to work with it on that assumption. What Feynman did though was to say “you may very well think that, but before I can think that, before I can actually absorb any thought into my worldview, I need to prove it to myself”. …

What’s in the box?

By Mark Di Somma

Marc Levinson’s book The Box explains why a “soulless aluminium or steel box held together with welds and rivets, with a wooden floor and two enormous doors at one end” was able to revolutionise trade. As Levinson points out the container is about much more than what it does, it’s about what it now represents to all of us living and buying in the global economy: an extraordinary system for moving goods between places at minimal cost and with as little complication as possible. Along the way, the humble container literally changed the world around it: new ports became valuable; just-in-time became possible; international trade accelerated; loading and delivery times shrank; trade became standardised; supply chains extended. But the economic benefits that arose from the container didn’t come from the box itself, clever as it was. The real innovation came from entrepreneurs who, over time, discovered how they could apply the potential of the container to their commercial advantage. It was those people who saw that this box with “all the romance of a tin …

The dangers of categorical denial

By Mark Di Somma

Some things are too big to fight. If you’re planning to redefine a whole category for example, then, unless you’re already a market leader, plan on a big outlay and a long runway. You’re literally battling the millions others have already invested to define what it is, what it means, who it’s for, where it’s found, who the key brands are, what the products generally cost and so much more. If your competitive advantage is predicated on breaking one of those fundamentals, be very aware of the fight you’re buying: You’re battling the pigeonhole that your supply chain will want to put you in; You’re fighting the expectation that your customers automatically have of you; You’re asking for the competition to diss you as unimportant or uninformed; and If you somehow beat all that, and manage to get established, you just pressed the GO button for a whole bunch of imitators to copy your IP and innovation Here’s the irony. If you’re going to enter/change a category, you must provide the market with enough for …