Dance the dance between standing out and blending in

It was Valentine’s Day, and the year was 1996. It was my third and final year of college. Even though it was an all-girls college, (maybe because it was an all-girls college), we all awaited Valentine’s Day with butterflies in our collective stomachs.

Every girl, even the ones who did not have a boyfriend, had resolved to bring her best-looking self to college. I also bought a new t-shirt, a beautiful neon green with a zipper. On D-day, I walked into campus only to merge into an undulating sea of neon green-clad bodies - a pride of Pea-hens preening for their real and imagined Peacocks.

Now, I am no Miranda Priestly, but I attribute this neon-green throw-up to this dress Kajol wore in DDLJ. (released in Oct 1995, and was still running to packed theatres).

This was a mimetic desire at its best - we are hard-wired to follow trends and before we realize it, we find ourselves swimming in the sea of sameness.

For marketers, ‘sameness’ is a malady, and we avoid it like the plague. But in doing so, we wrestle with a paradox -

If we copy-paste from others we run the risk of commoditizing our product, but if we are too different, our product might be too ahead of its time and fail.

This is also true in our personal and professional lives-

If we zig when others zig, we are labelled black sheep. If we are agreeable and mirror others, we blend into the background and are written off.

In an earlier edition, I wrote that our brains have evolved to notice and respond to the new while seeking comfort and continuity in the familiar.

That’s why marketers have to dance that age-old dance between blending in and standing out.

This leads us to wonder, in which situations is blending the new and the familar a good strategy? And where does sameness become a malady of mediocrity?

Like life, there is no one failsafe formula - blending in and standing out fall along a continuum, depending on your context.

Today, we look at "Safe is not safe." The next two weeks will cover "same-same but different" and "Hide in plain sight."

1. ‘Safe is not safe’ in ‘mating-like’ situations when a few (even just one) have to be chosen from many

Mating games are competitive.

As are job interviews, fundraising, sports events, conferences and crowded shopping aisles.

In such contexts, what stands out gets noticed.

That’s why brand merchandising at the point of sale is so critical to driving sales. Marketers who are reading this will know this sales tenet, “jo dikhta hai wohi bikta hai” (only what you can see, sells).

That’s also why we invest time and money to dress for the job we want, not the job we have and differentiate our elevator speech, pitch deck or resume.

Theoretically, this strategy sounds correct but is challenging to execute unless we are a niche player or unless we are forced to differentiate to survive.

1.1 Businesses wrestle with Clay Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma.

New products generate revenue only over time, so companies get imprisoned by the baseline effect. For instance, Nestle India needs to add 6 Yoga Bar companies in one year to grow by 10%. So, financially, they are better off allocating more resources to existing businesses instead of launching new disruptive product lines that have high failure rates.

Businesses fall into the trap of launching incremental innovations or copy the latest fads and end up failing.

Need proof that these incremental moves fail? Talk to Nielsen. They have been measuring breakthrough innovations for the last 11 years. (They define breakthroughs based on 18-month business performance).

They found that,

• on average, 14,000 new products are launched each year in India, and only ~0.2% of them succeed.
• In 2012, only 23 out of 16,914 launches succeeded (Economic Times) - a 0.13% success rate.
• In 2022, only 15 new launches made it to the breakthrough innovation list (I could not find the total number of new launches).

1.2 I looked at the face wash category to illustrate what copycat innovation looks like.

A search for ‘Face wash’ generates 20,000 results on Amazon, 3,055 on Nykaa and 21,505 on Flipkart. This makes sense. As horizontal marketplaces, Amazon and Flipkart want to offer as wide a selection as possible. While Nykaa, as a vertical store, curates its selection.

I analyze a subset of about 80 face wash products. A quick scan reveals the malady of sameness.

• 95% of the products are in tubes.
• All have a 4+ rating.
• All have colourful packaging (leaning towards green),
• while men’s face washes are 'manly’ in black.
• All drive incremental differences through smart wordplay (blemish free vs brightening, or anti-acne vs oily skin vs acne-prone skin), and through ingredient claims (saffron, lemon, neem, aloe, turmeric etc.).
• Nivea, with its teardrop bottle shape, does break out of the clutter for me.

When product innovation is dependent on ingredients, brands ride ingredient fads and are often unable to build sustainable and scalable revenue models.

As we know, sometimes an insurgent shakes the inertia out of a slothful category. The standout product for me, in this context, was Minimalist - a new DTC brand.

It breaks all the familiar category codes. A simple white, almost pharmaceutical type of bottle with scientific ingredients. This product looks effective and a consumer who wants a fairer complexion might just reconsider her face wash brand.

Even though they have copied a successful brand, Ordinary, for the India context, they are differentiated.

(For a two-year-old business, they are doing well. Last I checked, they had raised INR1.1 billion from Sequoia and also have Unilever Ventures as investors).

1.3 Cars have been forced to break out of innovation inertia because of Tesla

No one wants to kill the golden goose. Car companies have been riding the fossil fuel economy for decades and have not attempted to disrupt themselves.

Car manufacturers seem hell-bent on looking similar. They differentiate through branding and last-mile service. They forget that branding alone cannot differentiate a me-too product beyond a point, and last-mile service is replicable, so it may not remain a defensible moat for long.

The malady of sameness has crept into most aspects of their business. This is a picture of cars across price points, brands, and countries, with brand names masked.

Until Tesla comes along and proves that it pays to be meaningfully different.

At its highest, Tesla’s market cap was equal to the combined market cap of ten car makers.

Technological innovations generally have a two to three-year head start. Tesla’s success has jolted traditional car companies into green tech, and their new launches have started levelling the playing field.

1.4 Cirque du Soleil dances this dance well.

It has taken familiar circus-like elements and added world-class gymnastics, creativity, storytelling, emotion, and music to make it into an art form. They keep innovating and changing its acts to stay fresh and ahead of the curve. And this keeps their audience coming back for more.

That ends part one.

Part two on "same same but different" will drop next week.

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