Don’t Differentiate. Do This Instead.
I used to believe in the advice that, to succeed, a company needs to make sure its product is differentiated.
My logic went: in a crowded market, being different is the only thing that can sustainably help you break through to customers.
In recent years, though, I’ve been less sure that differentiation matters.
In the process of launching dozens of products, I’ve come to the surprising realization that differentiation alone rarely translates to product success.
And yet, when it comes to go-to-market advice, differentiation is still treated as gospel.
What I now know to be true is that mental and physical availability are more closely coupled to product success than differentiation. Reading How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp flipped a switch in me; one that my experience, especially in the past five years, has confirmed.
Physical and mental availability are separate but related concepts. Physical availability means ensuring your product is easy to find and buy wherever customers are looking. Mental availability means your brand easily comes to mind for customers looking for a solution in your category.
When a product is easy to buy and top of mind, regardless of its differentiation, it tends to succeed.
That’s not to say differentiation doesn’t matter. It does. But only at the margins. For people who are extremely knowledgeable about a category or product, the minutiae matter.
New customers, however, the ones who tend to make up most of your sales, rarely care about differentiation. They just want convenience and reassurance that you are reputable enough. These customers are satisficing and don’t want to spend much time making a decision about something they don’t care that much about.
Counterintuitively, the same logic people use to defend differentiation applies even more strongly to physical and mental availability.
In a world where you don’t have much time and are overloaded with information, for most purchases you just want something convenient and good enough.
I don’t need to buy the absolute best olive oil at Whole Foods; I just need the one that’s easy to find and comes to mind when I’m shopping.
Most product purchases are low stakes. If you get it wrong, you can choose something different the next time. The features that differentiate a product at the edges usually don’t matter because people don’t care that much.
Given this, if you face a tradeoff between building a feature that better differentiates your product and one that makes your product more convenient or salient, you should always choose the latter.