This newsletter’s book review features Different, the bestselling book by Harvard Business School professor, Youngme Moon. She has received numerous awards for her teaching and publications, bringing an entertaining and innovative outlook to the world of business, especially marketing, as we move forward into the 21st century. This is a book that challenges our notions of marketing a product and urges companies to consider turning some of their old patterns upside down. Moon urges businesses today to take the initiative to be different, to stand out from the crowd of competitors, and she offers reasons as to why this is more important today than ever. Not long ago, there were only a few varieties of bottled water or clothes detergents on store shelves.
Now there are multiples of that, making it increasingly confusing for the consumer. Businesses tend to always be working on “improving” their products, typically referred to as product augmentation. They either do this by augmentation-by-addition, where something is added to the product to make it better, or augmentation-by-multiplication, where special versions of the product are created to satisfy certain consumer groups. Tide, with extra stain-fighting ingredients, would be an example of the first; various forms of Diet Coke, Cherry Coke, and Caffeine-Free Coke, would be examples of the second. The problem with this, as Moon explains with numerous examples, is that the consumer can get confused with the selection or the various products can lose their meaning and no longer stand out. The author notes that a variety of factors, from the explosion of information in the digital age to glutted markets of products, have led to a reduction in brand loyalty. Moon’s solution is for businesses to differentiate themselves, and she offers ways for them to do so. She urges them to stop looking at differentiation as the “offspring of competition” and start seeing it as “an escape from competition altogether.”
One of her biggest examples of successful differentiation is Google. Up until Google came on the scene, web browsers had pages that were busy and glutted with information. Google offered an empty page, one that was serene and completely different from the norm, and it continues to evolve. What Moon finds so captivating with Google and other “reverse-positioned” brands is that they give us a stripped-down value proposition and offer us an extravagance at the same time. As she writes, it is a fusion of the basic with the sublime, and it is certainly distinctive. Moon cites many interesting examples of innovative companies in the ensuing chapters of the book, but she keeps coming back to the idea of turning something upside down, of being willing to see a product and what it offers from another perspective.
Her concluding advice to businesses is that they offer something that is hard to come by (even if the product is fairly common), that they stay committed to a big idea, and that they stay intensely human in their branding and their approach. Although a Harvard professor, Moon writes in an easy-going, often funny matter, including pictures and diagrams along the way. She does not stay on a high, academic plane, but keeps her material interesting and relates her subject to her everyday life as a mother, wife, professor, and consumer. I read some of her book on a long car ride, reading excerpts aloud to my husband as he drove. It helped the drive go more quickly, which speaks volumes for its interest. Enjoy.
