I giggled last week at a post on LinkedIn that tried to convince me that drinking water was THE POWER MOVE for ultra productive executives. We might scoff at their argument for “Strategic Hydration”, but let’s face it, we all add a little top spin to our comms from time to time. Underneath this however, is a bigger issue that deserves our reflection.
Business today has conflated the need to be UNIQUE with the desire to offer NEW. What's more, in our age of tech, innovation is fetishised, with those who appear to make the big breakthroughs are crowned as business royalty.
This creates elevated expectations for executives to be FIRST, to define whole new categories and lead from the front. Think of the Sam Altman effect at OpenAI for example.
Of course for the unicorns amongst us, with endless resources and no pressure for real revenue, this is possible. But for the real world of bootstrapping and finite budgets that you and I work in? Not so simple.
In my opinion, firsts are for fools and the Guinness Book of Records. We all know that fast followers are the ones who get catapulted forward into market success. But have you stopped to ask why?
Fast followers succeed because their product has a reference point for customers to compare against. In simple terms, they have something and someone to be “BETTER THAN”.
This is market context. The immutable first rule of positioning.
Positioning must leverage existing patterns of thinking, working with the way customers see the world, not fighting against it. For your product to be understood, your customers must intuitively know what to compare you against.
In many ways, picking an existing category to disrupt is way easier than starting a new category from scratch, because your customers already know what to expect from you. You get to focus all your customers’ attention on what makes you better, not what makes you the same.
Remember that differentiation is only ever relative to your ideal customer. Your customer will subconsciously position you in comparison to other options that they know and might select. The tighter you define your customer, the sharper your differentiation can become.
You could argue that this stifles innovation as we all strive to fit in, but it’s really about being easy to understand. If you can’t be understood, you won’t be purchased. So don’t sacrifice clarity by being pointlessly different. Leave the markers in place that your customers need to navigate by.
Next time your product or market team says you need to stand out, stand up in defence of being more similar. It might just make your sales close faster than you ever thought possible.
