Forgot About Differentiation

🎧 Play while reading: Forgot About Dre - Dr. Dre

Take a look around. We’ve been sanitised.

Grey-scale interiors. Indistinguishable, bubble-shaped cars. Nondescript fashion. Websites built from the same template.

Don’t get me started on film and music… peak circus, to cram down with your bread.

Chronic.

Every facet of our lives seems to be sterilised into a sedating, radio-friendly unit shifter.

It's like we're surviving on the psychological equivalent of the grey mush Neo chews-down on the Nebuchadnezzar. Enough to keep going. Not quite living.

We've reached a point where "uniqueness" means curating from a narrowly approved palette, rather than actually risking anything.

Everyone desperately conforming, while underneath it all, starving for something different. Like sheep that want to try sushi.

This is not specific to consumerism. Categories I look at, across B2C and B2B, seem to suffer from the same atrophy of diversity. There’s never been as much choice, yet at the same time it all blends together in a distant haze.

Brands like to think of themselves as Straight Outta Compton. But it's often Straight Outta Competitor Playbooks.

Less “f*ck the police”…. more “gettin’ jiggy with it”.

Noise.

Like a jungle in this habitat

The market rewards different. Yet, companies run towards each other in the mushy middle. Categories become fifty shades of grey, and the competitive landscape devolves into Mad Max on the moon. Rather than a rich solar system.

Why? A few reasons.

First, it's an unconscious mirroring of the world around us. Culture itself has been constricting and sanitising — as we've seen — and businesses are not immune to the same gravitational pull. You absorb the water you swim in.

Secondly, it feels safe. Most people, given a map, will choose to settle close to where others already have. A city, a village. It’s a more comfortable starting point, mentally and physically.

Striking out into uncharted territory feels exposed. It requires conviction and creative energy. It demands a kind of discipline that hasn’t really been codified, and unlike sales or accounting, nobody’s teaching it.

The companies that do break out by being different are usually powered by a founder’s instinct for the left field, and over time that instinct seeps into the company culture.

Thirdly, there’s been a philosophical shift. Many companies now approach marketing like the finance and engineering department. This treats everything as a number, a metric, a return. Which, has the effect of creating tunnel vision: placing an emphasis on chasing the same <5% of in-market buyers as everybody else, competing on commoditised terms.

The main lever in that dynamic is to bid more, spend more. This plays straight into Google and Meta’s hands, who are very happy to keep the merry-go-round spinning. The more brands and products look alike, the more companies rely on the paid media drug to reach and attract prospects.

PLUS, there's been a growing movement against differentiation itself.

A school of thought has emerged, arguing that differentiation is a myth. That it never meaningfully drove growth. That in a social media and AI-dominated world of endless content and ideas, it’s irrelevant.

Please. Choke me to death on a Charleston Chew.

The irony is exquisite. The people pushing this agenda have built their platform by doing the exact thing they're telling companies to abandon: being different. For that last part, I applaud them. But, the message itself is a toxic tonic.

If you are dismissing differentiation, you are either being disingenuous to advance your own standing, delusional, or out of ideas. You have taken Ozempic for intellectualism.

A noisier society does not invalidate the model because the difficulty level changed from medium to hard, it makes it more critical to master.

The “sea of sameness” that many complain about represents opportunity. Not an excuse to accept brand-building mediocrity.

In 100 years, we'll still be talking about Apple's maverick rise, the VW “lemon” ad, and the concept at the heart of it all — positioning.

This is the millennium of aftertaste

So from here on out, it’s chronic 2.0.

The sanitisation, the mushy middle, the fifty shades of grey. AI will add to it like the sorcerer's brooms in Fantasia. Multiplying. Filling every bucket. Relentlessly flooding the room with more of the same.

It is the ultimate homogeniser. Every piece of fruit goes into the blender, and the smoothie comes out tasting the same. Unless you feed it an original recipe.

Most companies won’t. “Mixed berry” feels safer. They’ll be busy squabbling over who has better blueberries, instead of creating something novel like “peanut apple” and building an idea around it.

The more AI produces, the more undifferentiated ideas flood every category. Which means the signal versus noise filter people use will become sharper. Attention won't go to the most produced or the most optimised. It will go to the most distinctly original ideas that resonate. These only come from human insight and taste.

Undifferentiated ideas leave no aftertaste — no residue, no feeling, nothing that lingers at 2am. The companies and people that will cut through are the ones that leave something behind. A feeling. A point of view. An idea you keep coming back for.

The bar here is high. Many companies that believe they are differentiated, aren't. At least not in any way prospects can feel. This is one of the most common mistakes I see. Organisations that are too close to their own situation, their own product, their own internal logic.

They can see the difference. Their prospects can't.

It's the zebra problem. To zebras, every zebra looks totally different. To humans, they're just a herd. Until you look closely at the stripes.

That means your differentiation has to hit like a sledgehammer to the head. Less zebra, more purple giraffe.

Your taste is not a soft skill. It is the strategy.

Taste is knowing when to stop. It is choice. It is sacrifice. It is ingenuity.

What idea do you want to own?

It should be dramatic.

The aftertaste you leave in your product, your brand, your category, and everything you do is what compounds in the mind of the market. Collectively, this is your positioning.

Choose wisely.

I’ll be back in your inbox soon. 🤘

Martin

Did someone forward you this email? Happens allll the time.

Subscribe to receive more content like this, occasionally. 👇