In high school, I wanted senior Tim O’Brian’s hair. Like mine, it was blond and longer, but his curled up at the ends like Lilliputian ski jumps while feathering back like a griffin’s wings. I dreamed that Tim had girls running their fingers through his mane. I wanted girls to do that to me. My locks didn’t cooperate. The more I fussed, the bigger my hair got. I had a dandy lion mane gone to seed (see photo).
We all go to great lengths to mimic others, whether as teenagers or marketers. And the outcome is rarely pretty.
Trying to keep up with the corporate Joneses can backfire. When everybody is spending too much time looking at what everybody else is doing, everybody starts looking like everybody else. An oft-quoted 2001 study by Copernicus/Market Facts indicates that many brands become less differentiated over time, despite their corporate goals and fancy-pants consultants.
We are social creatures, so we care about what is happening on the other side of the fence. But when we care too much, we can’t see the landscape for the grass.
On top of that, if you believe that business is even remotely Darwinian, you have to realize that “natural selection is a homogenizing force” and “it eliminates the vast majority of macroscopic design variants because they are not improvements” according to How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker.
Pinker continues: “An intelligent being cannot treat every object it sees as a unique entity unlike anything else in the universe. It has to put objects in categories so that it may apply its hard-won knowledge about similar objects, encountered in the past, to the object at hand.”
Lastly, by definition uniqueness must be a rarity. Oh yes, you might say, we are all special in our own ways. But as Dash reminds us in The Incredibles, “That’s just another way of saying no one is [special].”
This begs the question: is branding possible? For most, maybe not. But marketers who clearly connect what the customer craves (consciously or unconsciously) with what the brand delivers, in a differentiated, clear, and powerful manner; will end up with the right “haircut.”
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Clone Wars
We all go to great lengths to mimic others, whether as teenagers or marketers. And the outcome is rarely pretty.
Trying to keep up with the corporate Joneses can backfire. When everybody is spending too much time looking at what everybody else is doing, everybody starts looking like everybody else. An oft-quoted 2001 study by Copernicus/Market Facts indicates that many brands become less differentiated over time, despite their corporate goals and fancy-pants consultants.
We are social creatures, so we care about what is happening on the other side of the fence. But when we care too much, we can’t see the landscape for the grass.
On top of that, if you believe that business is even remotely Darwinian, you have to realize that “natural selection is a homogenizing force” and “it eliminates the vast majority of macroscopic design variants because they are not improvements” according to How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker.
Pinker continues: “An intelligent being cannot treat every object it sees as a unique entity unlike anything else in the universe. It has to put objects in categories so that it may apply its hard-won knowledge about similar objects, encountered in the past, to the object at hand.”
Lastly, by definition uniqueness must be a rarity. Oh yes, you might say, we are all special in our own ways. But as Dash reminds us in The Incredibles, “That’s just another way of saying no one is [special].”
This begs the question: is branding possible? For most, maybe not. But marketers who clearly connect what the customer craves (consciously or unconsciously) with what the brand delivers, in a differentiated, clear, and powerful manner; will end up with the right “haircut.”