The Trap of Differentiation

By striving for differentiation from the competition, you end up losing the difference.trap

• Youngme Moon’s “Differentiation Trap”

  • effort
    • Examine competitive products in detail
      • Add features that are not in your product
      • Enhance features that are inferior to the competition
      • Trying to make a difference by retrofitting features that have no difference.
  • This effort will cause change in the direction of eliminating differences in everything except “trying to make a difference”.
  • The “difference” is often a “superficial difference that can be added after the fact,” not an essential difference.
    • Creators recognize this as a point of differentiation, but customers do not.
  • The result is a “product with no intrinsic difference” despite the effort

• In the context of personal productivity.

  • I think the biggest differentiator is “he/she is passionate about it”.
  • Working out of a sense of obligation reduces productivity.

• What’s the differentiation?” The question “What’s the differentiation?

  • Many people do it because it’s an easy question to answer.
    • Related: discussion of bicycle parking - bk blog
  • When you don’t understand the technical content, it is easy to pull out the closest thing you can think of and ask, “What’s the difference between these things?” It is easy to pull out the closest thing you can think of and ask, “What’s the difference?
  • It’s common to be exposed to these kinds of questions, so you need to think about countermeasures, but striving to differentiate yourself from such things in the early stages of a project may fall into the “differentiation trap” mentioned above.

• Mr. Takezako clearly states in his PM profile that he “welcomes reinventing the wheel” https://www.ipa.go.jp/files/000054588.pdf

• The addition approach leads to averaging.

  • How to come up with good ideas

• Youngme Moon’s idea of measures to prevent differentiation traps

  • Idea Brand
    • Reverse Brand
      • Ignore performance axes that are considered “good” in existing products
        • Google’s strategy of creating a page with only a search window as opposed to the amount of information that competitors are cramming into their portals.
        • Cell phones for children/elderly people that dare to include limited functionality while smartphones are becoming more sophisticated.
    • breakaway brand
      • Existing product classifications to be classified differently.
    • Hostile Brand
      • Reverses and emphasizes the performance axis that the majority of consumers consider “good”.
        • I’m not sure how it differs from reverse.
        • Is the difference between the “creator” or the “buyer” as the entity that thinks it is good?
      • Going to fight with the majority (HOSTILE)
      • Aim for consumers to be polarized between “likes” and “dislikes”.

• ref. http://amzn.to/2tCdKFB

  • Academia and the Trap of Differentiation

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