This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit idbrief.substack.com Uniquely Identical? Ever wonder why the harder you work to stand out, the more you seem the same? A few years ago, I stood at the front of a ballroom filled with about 400 hundred interior designers and asked them this question: What makes you so different that your ideal prospective clients will be inspired to choose you? Hands went up across the room, some of them quickly and with real confidence — service, taste, relationships, track record, we really listen, we’re full-service and on and on. I called on one woman, and she explained, with great pride, that her firm had adopted a 3D software application that allowed her to show clients renderings and make sure they would get exactly what they wanted. She was certain this separated her from the pack. I then asked the audience whether, just by chance, anyone else happened to offer a similar capability. About 75 hands went up. Later that day I broke the group up into smaller breakout sessions. The assignment was to look at the websites of at least six other designers in your group, and to make a list of the key capabilities they offered on their sites. And then, to compare that to your own site. The groups broke up and we reassembled en masse. I have to say, the crowd was more than a little “blah.” They had begun to realize that they were putting potential customers in a position not unlike placing an alien in a cereal aisle. Let me explain. This analogy comes from the fabulous book, Different, written a Harvard marketing professor named Youngme Moon. Imagine you are standing in the cereal aisle In the book, Moons asks you to imagine that you are standing in a supermarket and must select a cereal you have never tried before. Truth is, this would be easy because you are what Moon calls a connoisseur of cereal, meaning that you would filter by reduction, ruling out the children’s cereals and the sugared ones and the oat-based ones until you arrive at something close to what you already like. Now imagine an alien drops from the sky into that same aisle — no history, no preferences, no working notion of what a cereal even is. No matter how much intelligence we grant him, he is overwhelmed, because where the connoisseur sees a hundred meaningful differences the novice sees only a wall of sameness: a hundred boxes of roughly the same size, similarly priced, each shouting its virtues in the same bright colors. He lacks the filters that would let him tell one from another, and so he cannot choose. He is in search of simplicity, but overwhelmed by choice. The trap Moon identifies is this: as a category (cereal or interior design) accumulates more and more options, the differences between those options gradually cease to register as differences at all, until heterogeneity comes to be experienced — her words — as homogeneity. What was meant to be different, begins to look the same. Google understood this. Before Google, the search engine game was a never-ending war between companies like Yahoo! and AOL to see who could jam the most ads, banners, and likes on a single web page. Want to know about sports, politics, history, weather, movies, celebrities, money and everything else under the sun? Go to Yahoo! or AOL. And then a funny thing happened. A website was introduced that had taken all of that away. All of that choice was gone. There was, simply a white page with a small white box in the middle of it. Google. Within years, Google became the lone behemoth and Yahoo!, AOL, and dozens of others struggled to survive. Because Google didn’t “augment” or add. It reduced. It took away. If you came in certain that you were different, the difficult news is that the very things you have been adding in order to stand out — the refreshed website, the blog, the e-design tier, the trade program, the white-glove concierge experience — are likely the very things that have made you resemble everyone else. The harder you worked at distinction the more thoroughly you buried it. Rather than becoming unique, you became uniquely identical. The vital role of tradeoffs Let me remind you of the definition of strategy: “A choice of complementary activities done different from or better than competitors, and acceptance of the tradeoffs. That’s it. That’s all you need to do to reach you highest goals, but you can’t pick and choose the parts you like. You have to do all of it, including the tradeoffs. (And sometimes, especially the tradeoffs!) Southwest Airlines is the business school poster child for tradeoffs. For over thirty years, they removed flyer choices such as reserved seats and meal service. They were willing to lose a large segment of flyers to achieve their primary goals of quick turnaround and low fares. They made the tradeoffs and mastered the complementary activities that made them the most profitable airline in the US for decades. Many larger airlines tried to copy the Southwest strategy and couldn’t because they could not bring themselves to truly make the necessary tradeoffs. They kept reserved seating. They kept meal service. And they failed. So, the useful question is no longer, “What more can I do?” But rather, “What less can I do…and do it brilliantly?” What am I prepared to stop doing — to give up entirely — so that I might master that which will lead to being known for the one thing that is genuinely mine? Want another example? Well, imagine the finest heart surgeon in the world — thirty years at the top of his field, the man to whom the most difficult cases are flown from across the globe — and notice how complete your confidence in him is. If you or someone you love needs heart surgery, this is the man for you. Now suppose I mention that he also performs a little oral surgery, and some breast augmentation on the side, and the occasional tummy tuck, and hair plugs, and that he has lately agreed to host a reality television program and wants to appear on Dancing With the Stars. Your confidence in him as a great heart surgeon falls, and it falls not because you have concluded that he is bad at any of those other things — for all you know he is genuinely accomplished at every one of them. Rather, your confidence falls because excellence, as we intuitively understand it, is a narrowing rather than a broadening, and the surgeon who does “everything” has signaled you, without intending to, that he is committed to nothing in particular. The narrow practitioner earns our trust; the well-rounded one we struggle even to remember. This is the move that every great escape brand has made, and it has always been a move of subtraction. Google launched a nearly empty page into a world of cluttered portals and won precisely on the strength of what it refused to place on the screen. In-N-Out has served the same six items on an unchanging menu for decades while its competitors piled on salads and breakfast platters and desserts. The most successful firms did not differentiate harder than their rivals; they escaped the contest altogether. (If your familiar with “blue ocean strategy,” rest assured that will be coming up in a future newsletter.) First recognition, then revolution! Discovering that you have likely become uniquely identical is the easy part. The harder part is becoming truly different, knowing the one thing your firm in particular should pour itself into, identify, and master the key capabilities for. And, of course, make the necessary tradeoffs. That’s the definition of strategy, and strategy is the only thing that will truly separate you from the pack. Below, I’ll take you through a case study of how one consulting client of mine wanted to do more, was convinced to do less, and thrived in a market she loves.
