Better or different?

One of the things companies get wrong is that they try to be?better?instead of?different.

Why? Better is easy to package up. Its a playbook. You take an existing process and improve it. Humans are geared towards this type of progress – consistent, tiny improvements are (literally) in our DNA.

But 'better' has diminishing returns. As every company races to improve, the results of these efforts over time begin to matter less and less to customers. Incremental progress eventually gets competed away.?Great products eventually improve past what people need. If you can remember anything from this article, I hope that’s it.?

Let's look at the early years of McDonalds as an example. They invented quick serve. (Well actually “fast food” but the industry managed to rebrand that). Ray Croc’s innovation was speed and consistency. In post-war America, two things happened. People fell in love with cars and they had a lot of kids. There was nothing new about cheap hamburgers. But McDonalds solved a new problem by serving convenient food that targeted the new needs of families and built an empire. Better and different.

One of the ongoing themes in our client work is that positioning matters more now than it used to. Customers have a lot of information at their fingertips and know how to find it. The internet is great at serving up choice, endless reviews and research guides which naturally lead to comparison.

Think about buying a mattress. How many reviews can you really read before your eyes glaze over? There are only so many ways to describe soft, hard, etc. “Better” is hard to grasp on to intuitively. But then you stumble on Casper. A mattress in a box? Delivered to my door? And I don’t have to go to talk to some guy at Sleep Country about my bed? That’s different. It might not be for you, but it will be for certain customers.

But more importantly, this differentiation reconfigures how you are sorting things. Suddenly the mattress matrix in your mind has a new category?“Will it be shipped to my door without me having to talk to anyone?”.?

Different is clearly valuable. So why is it so much harder to do than better? The answer has a lot more to do with human psychology than it does with business strategy.?Choosing to be different is a stake in the ground. There is risk in it. Your peers may question your thinking. If your company is large enough, the industry press will probably lambast you for it - “But that’s not how its?done”

Its also harder – time, money, people, risk. Great positioning requires a strong stomach and conviction. Saying “no” to a lot of seemingly good, typical things is a lot harder to explain to your team and customers.

But the magic spot is when you are better?and?different. Both. Companies that are both better and differentiated command price premiums and build stronger customer relationships. Companies that only focus on better end up as a commodity.

How do you get to different? One helpful prompt is to use extreme questions to change the context. This article has is a helpful resource generate transformative ideas.