Becoming an outlier
Think for a moment: what brands are you truly attached to? It’s not an easy answer to give, is it? With a few exceptions most of the brands today deliver a good enough product or a service. Something that fits our expectations. But doesn’t quite exceed it.
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There is some really bad news for majority of the brands out there: the report of the meaningful brands shows that if as much as 77% of brands disappeared today, nobody would notice. Does it mean that all these brands suck at what they do? Quite the opposite. They put tons of effort to deliver good quality. To be at least as good as the competition. To keep on improving. The result is somewhat disheartening: many of these brands become heterogeneously homogeneous (as Youngme Moon nicely captured in her book “Different”). What does it mean?
Heterogeneously homogeneous
Look at the banks or the telecoms in your country (or any other country in the world for that matter). Do they deliver different functionality? Not really? Are there variability in reliability? Not many. Is the usability distinguishable? Neh. Do they at least look different? Hmm… maybe with the brand colors… What you see happening is not differentiation but imitation. In other words it seems like every single brand is running as fast as they can to… stand still. No wonder that, despite the hope of evoking any affection in their customers, they are seen as indistinguishable. So, here’s the painful truth: no matter what business you are in, your are most likely in the red ocean of the competitive world. Doing what others are doing it not gonna help. You need a new way of thinking. A new approach.
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The traps of heterogeneous homogeneity
A few more things that you need to be aware of. The first one of them is positive adaptation — this annoying habit of people to getting quickly used to good stuff. Remember the unpacking experience of your first iPhone? The weigh of the box, the shortness of the instruction, the smoothness of the foil? Today you expect nothing less. Not from Apple. From any smartphone producer. Artful packaging is a great example of how seamlessly we all got used to having the impression of opening a gift with any product we purchase.
The other thing to stay mindful of regards working harder on what you already do. If you are in the jam department: creating new flavours of jams. If you are in the shoe-maker company, making 10 more kinds of shoes. Let’s face it: abundance has lost its status quite some time ago.Everybody is used to having unlimited selection. Your next bag of almost-the-same-as-the-last-one-but-new-and-improved chips is not going to make much of a difference. The only thing you might provoke with such an approach is to trigger even stronger than usual paradox of choice — the feeling of being less autonomous in our choices than more.
There is one more trap in doing more of the same: the next choice you derive for your customer is increasingly more trivial. If you are a bank, you might offer 2,1% on your customers’ savings rather than 2% like your competition. One of my clients in the finance industry noticed that such actions lead to formation of a new group of customers, so called Tornadoes. They would move some of their money to gain whatever financial advantage this very bank offered and once the promotion was over they would withdraw all the savings back to their old account. Short-term it might have looked like the promotion has worked but did it really?
Last but not least trap regards placing the focus on what you do on improving your weaknesses as compared to the competition rather that looking for a meaningful differentiator. Sure, it is important to improve on your weaknesses. But if you do in the best case scenario you will be exactly like everybody else. Does it mean that you shouldn’t compare yourself? I wouldn’t go that far. Sure, you can keep on comparing even if to know where your weaknesses are but you shouldn’t spend all your effort only to fill in the holes. I would say 30 to 50% of doing so is more than ample. The rest of your time an effort might be worthwhile to spend on building your differentiators.
I can almost see the doubt in your voice as you read it. What about the rankings? What about the benchmarking measures? Are we to neglect them? Not really. But you need to understand that they are a pit hole. I’ve been working with yet another client from the banking services who struggled with this very challenge. For years they were a leader in a was was seen the most prestigious ranking for customer experience in their country. But they felt like the improvement was not really happening. So, they asked me to help them differentiate their customer services. We did so. And two things happened. They lost their position as the leader in the ranking. The word-of-mouth about the quality of their service increased two-fold. You might wonder what the hell….?
The trick laid in the way the ranking was executed. There was a “industry standard” defined against which all banks were measured. Can you smell the averaging effect of the “industry standard”? As my client altered the way they served their customers, obviously, they stopped complying with that standard. So, naturally, their ranking went down. So what? All the other numbers showed that clients loved the new way of being served. Did it make sense to do it? From the hindsight it feels obvious that it did. Was it easy? Believe it it was hard as hell. Why? Because if you want to be different you will be one of a kind. There will be nothing and no one to compare you to. And this is scary because you are never quite sure until later whether the choices you make are the right ones or not.
Meaningfully different
Ok, we saw that being more or less the same as others doesn’t quite do the trick. But why do people look for the difference? It stems from the need for self-actualization: none of us wants to be average. So, we want to surround ourselves with brands that help us feel unique. Fine, but can you tell us how do do it already?
I am afraid, becoming idealistic is the only reasonable trick here. You can be idealistic about the different aspects of your business (technology, communication, experience) but you need to create this unreachable ideal that is like a moving target, never quite reachable. One more story comes to my mind as I write it. We’ve been working on a pretty cool offer for kids. We’ve created this amazing packaging called the magic box. Imagine a box filled with a soft pillow and in that pillow some unexpected goodies are hidden. Kids, who we tested this idea with, loved it to the bits. But then the business reality hit. Making such a box would be too expensive and also logistically inconvenient. So, instead of our beautiful Magic Box, we ended up with MacDonald’s box… Pretty devastated by this decision I went to talk to the business owner of this product, asking how could this have happened? She said: — you are f*cking idealist, which is sometimes pretty unnerving. But if you weren’t we wouldn’t have even taken a step of having this box for kids. You know, I need to be a pragmatist here but your idealism doesn’t allow me to stick to my old ways anymore. It was quite a revelation for me to hear that. It made me realize that we just need to try to fly high. Sure, we will rarely (if ever) get there but if we don’t even try, we will stay in the very same place we are today. We just need to understand that any idea we create will be pragmatized and reduced. So, what? Next time the bar will be higher anyway. And higher again.
This commitment to idealism has one serious consequence. One of them is the ability to say: No to things. It may seem easy but it is not. Imagine you see your competition creating yet another new product. Can you feel the pressure on you from all the sides to do the same? Yet, saying: no is what keeps our vision clean and legible for your customers. And this is what will make you stand out from the crowd in the long run. So, in a way you need to get a commitment to let go of many things that might have been the core of your business activities today. Because remember that your goal is to get your customers believe that your brand delivers something your competition does not.
You are going to suck at it at first
Yes, you are! Firstly because in our daily business practice most of us forgot to see what it means to be different. In the benchmarking frenzy, can you see how to differentiate right away? I guess, not really. Because we are used to think in the terms of something being “better” or “worse” than something else. And the thing it not to be better but to be different. To have a character that is distinguishable and unique.
I have this one trick I do with my clients, whether we design a strategy, a product or a process. I ask them to choose 5 adjectives to become their differentiators. Once they do it, I ask them to mark how strong or intense these qualities should be in whatever they put out on the market. Once we have that, I am simply say: — This is your evaluation tool. If your customers will mark the scales like you do, it means you delivered on your edges.
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But even if you are not going to rock it from the start, you need to keep on trying. the. More practice you get the easier it will become for you to be an outlier. In other words, deliberate practice will set you apart. By the way, don’t fall into the trap of believing that you need to acquire the greatest talent to do so. I’ve been working with yet another client from the e-commerce business who would always say: — Only if we hired people like those working at Google, we would then rock the market. Here’s the news: not true at all. Another client of mine within 6months changed the way his team designs but simply giving permission to experiment and try crazy ideas. At first, all designers felt like walking on a boat in the biggest possible storm but in time being slightly crazy with ideas became the new normal. And that’s how the change happened. Not by one big transformative thunder but with a thousand of steps, some of which felt like a kid just trying to let go of the rant of the chair for the first time.
Experimentation is your friend
When you are about to take these first steps towards your idealistic vision, you need to remember that your first ideas will be extremely fragile and prone to sudden death. To many others they will feel crazy, insane and often stupid. This is why whatever innovation you might think of is so easy to be killed.
What I typically advise in such situations is to:
—carefully choose people who are thought outliers themselves
— create a support system for testing and trying
— start thinking in hypotheses to test rather than fully blows solutions to implement
— give space for looking for inspiration and farming diverged thinking
— go to extreme users and extreme ideas to test your edges
So, in other words, experiment and test small improvements that will over time lead to significant change. There is this funny saying in Polish that feels quite appropriate here. It goes like this: Whatever temporary solution you set up, it seems to work well much longer than expected. It is because the presser on a temporary solution is much less that on the permanent one, so the solution itself feels more relaxed. It may mean doing less. It may mean going smaller. But whatever you do, these philosophy of creating temporary solutions might help you get through even the toughest organizational resistance. Because who would say no to simply testing, right?
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Aga Szóstek, PhD is an experience designer with over 19 years of practice in both academic and business world. She is an author of “The Umami Strategy: stand out by mixing business with experience design”, a creator of tools supporting designers in the ideation process: Seed Cards and the co-host in the Catching The Next Wave podcast.