
Differentiation Strategy (and the Sea of Sameness) - rcarrigan87
https://cxl.com/blog/differentiation-strategy/
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droba33
For young companies, most advisors love to tell you, "Find out what your
competition is doing and copy it. They must be doing it right and they already
did the work for you." I cannot tell you how many times I heard that... and
from top people too. To start, that may be true to a certain extent, but it
can only get you so far as you mentioned. Plus, you started your company to
fit a market need that was not being addressed, so celebrate that need and
your ability to address it. Competing on differentiation is the only way to
actually sustain a new business. Also, I like the Tesla shout out. They
constantly look to differentiate any way they can. Great article. Lots of
great information.

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torusiil
"It’s not enough to be just a little bit different. The differentiation needs
to be big enough to tilt the decision in your favor.

Adding words like “robust” to your email marketing software description won’t
do much."

Unfortunately, that's how most of us do it - afraid to be different but still
afraid to look as everyone else.

So much value from just one article.

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peeplaja
Author here. I spent the last winter studying differentiation - reading every
book on the topic I could find (surprisingly little has been written about
it), discussing it with people, thinking about it constantly.

The article is a summary of this work. Happy to answer any questions.

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zagyex
Liked the category creation part. Many of the most succesful products (not the
first ones) created their own category so much that sometimes even their brand
name serves as a category name today.

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benlabay
lots of psychology experiments speak to the fact that very different is good
at attracting attention, but people usually convert/engage/choose what's
familiar. How does your premise adjust for this known effect?

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peeplaja
You need to be different in a way that's meaningful to the customer. "Most
environmentally sensitive email marketing software" is likely not gonna land,
even though you'd be the only one doing that.

If you address my pain, solve for my particular use case that nobody else is
addressing, I might choose you. But if you're just like Mailchimp (that Im
familiar with), I'll go with Mailchimp.

