Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

182 Pages·2011·1.51 MB·English

by  Youngme Moon

For Robert, Jalen, and Tailo
contents

introduction
a preview
1
part The Competitive Herd (critique)
• the herd instinct
• the paradox of progress
• the category blur (how we cope)
• escaping the herd
2
part No Contest (celebration)
• reversal
• breakaway
• hostility
• difference
3
part The Human Touch (reflection)
• marketing myopia, revisited
• sign-off
addendum
acknowledgments
introduction

when my eldest son was in second grade, he started bringing home
poems to memorize. Each week, a new poem. So each night, we would
memorize a verse, repeating the words over and over again until they were
securely mimeographed into the folds of his supple little brain.
At first, I did this without question or complaint. But as the days passed,
I found myself reconsidering the purpose of these mental calisthenics. You
see, for the past ten years I have been an educator myself, a professor of
marketing at the Harvard Business School, where every semester my
colleagues and I require our students to master a very particular language.
We expose them to the “grammar” of business—essentially a set of
frameworks and best practices—and we make them rehearse this grammar
over and over again, in case study after case study.
But what I have learned from this experience is that while a commitment
to rehearsal will almost always produce competence, it will almost always
produce a kind of automaticity, too. There is a reason why so many
educators rail against rote learning, and it is that they know it can have the
self-defeating effect of promoting a kind of mindlessness. Once we over-
learn something, we cease to know it anymore at all. This is what I see
happening in the world of business today. In industry after industry,
business professionals have become so practiced in a particular way of
doing things that they appear to have forgotten the point of it all—which is
to create meaningful and compelling product offerings for people like you
and me. This is not to say that these folks lack the requisite business skills;
rather, it is to say that they have become almost too proficient, in the same
way that a well-oiled production system can be scarily proficient at
churning out one perfectly identical clone after another.
I may be a business academic, but I am also a citizen, a wife, and a
mother, and my guess is that I probably experience the world in much the
same way that you experience it. Which means that when I leave my house
to purchase something as prosaic as a bottle of shampoo or a carton of juice
or a pair of sneakers, what happens to me is probably very similar to what
happens to you: I am confronted with a dizzying array of options from
which to choose. In every aisle, in every store, what used to be, just a
generation ago, a relatively modest selection of, say, four or five, has
somehow turned into an indistinguishable selection of eleventy thousand.
Meanwhile, there is a redundancy in the way these products are advertised
to me as well. To be fluent in the language of product marketing is
apparently to have polished the language of hyperbole, and so I am assured,
again and again, that each one of these products is NEW AND IMPROVED.
Everything is BIG BETTER BEST.
And yet here is the thing. We have all lived through quite a lot in the past
few years. This most recent recession, in particular, hit us all pretty hard,
and although each one of us had little choice but to weather through in our
own private way, I can’t help but believe that the storm refocused us all in
some collective way, too. I remember right after the first wave of the
recession hit—the housing market had just imploded and the credit markets
had frozen up—feeling almost grateful that I didn’t live in one of the more
sumptuous estates in our town, one of those homes that I used to so admire.
I also remember reading stories in the newspaper about how people, even
those who were financially secure, had begun rethinking their most basic
consumption patterns. It was as if our notions of aspiration and acquisition
had shifted, overnight. Excess was out, replaced by a more thoughtful
consideration of the stuff with which we filled our homes, our closets, our
lives. The age of abundance is over, I remember thinking, not because
things are no longer abundant, but because abundance has lost its status as
our reigning aspiration.
I have always believed that there is a part of business that is an art, and if
I had to describe the particular complexion of this art, I would describe it as
the art of calibration. In my mind, this is where the marketer must step in:
The marketer needs to be able to ascertain the dimensions of our desire—
paying heed to the things that we want, yes, but paying equal heed to the
things that we do not. It may be true that our desire has no limit, but it
certainly has a shape. Yet what is missing from business today is a
sensitivity to the contours of our aspiration. As a culture, we have moved
well past the point where we are impressed by the traditional markers of
affluence—the profusion of look-alike choices, the embarrassing display of
whistles and bells. Nevertheless, to this day … one need only to walk into a
store to experience the degree to which business doesn’t seem to get this.
A decade ago, product marketing could afford to be as over-the-top as
rock and roll. Hyperbole came with the territory; a lack of originality was
no big deal. To get the crowd’s attention, all you needed was to memorize a
couple of predictable chord progressions, nail a catchy chorus, and then hit
the stage with confidence, energy, and enthusiasm. The trick was to be
loud, excessive, bold. A few smoke and mirrors didn’t hurt, either. Today,
that kind of marketing is likely to appear as vacuous as a 1980s heavy metal
band. Today, the business maestros more likely to garner a listening
audience are the ones who understand that, in this era of more thoughtful
consumption, louder is seldom better, and more-of-the-same almost never
adds up to the best.
I wrote this book because I believe that what most of us are looking for
today is a sound more resonant. A sound more meaningful. A vibration that
we are able to experience, in our bones, as being somehow … different.
And so that is what this book is about: It is an exploration of what it means
for a business to commit to giving us this. It is an exploration of what it
means for a business to decide to be different.
I do this by venturing into the world of sameness, in search of difference.
I seek to identify the outliers, the anomalies, the iconoclasts—the players
who have rejected well-rehearsed business routines in favor of an approach
more adventurous. These are the players with a feel for improvisation, for
experimentation, the players who have somehow managed to build brands
and create products that are striking a genuine chord with even the most
jaded among us.
Along the way, I make the argument that it is time for business
professionals—marketers, in particular—to begin letting go of some of the
things that they have come to regard as best practice. This is no easy
challenge; as I tell my students: Learning is easy; forgetting is hard. Yet this
is precisely what I believe is necessary if business is to build a new culture
of consumer engagement, one that creates, at the very least, the possibility
that we will begin listening again.
Incidentally, this past year, it was my younger son’s turn to start second
grade. As expected, it wasn’t long before he—like his brother before him—
began bringing home poems to memorize. Each week, a new poem. And so
each night, I found myself dutifully feeding him his lines, over and over
again, my déjà vu complete.
Only this time, my heart wasn’t in it. Because over the years, I have
come to believe that a poem perfectly memorized is a poem too easily
recited. And a poem performed without effort is a poem that has lost all
meaning.
I have a friend, a businesswoman, who claims that she can absorb the
gist of a business book, any business book, in under an hour. Of course,
whether or not you’re impressed by her claim depends on whether you’ve
ever read one yourself. Most business books are written for easy digestion.
They are reductive in the way that subway maps are reductive; the
elimination of unnecessary information creates a kind of conceptual
isolation that is functionally efficient to the extreme.
But reduction can come at a cost. A few years ago, Edward Tufte, who
resides at Yale and spends most of his time thinking about the presentation
of information, published a monograph (The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint)
about the cognitive hegemony of the world’s most popular presentation
software. As Tufte pointed out, the unfortunate price of simplification is,
well, oversimplification. Not to mention the additional tax paid out in the
form of pedantry. Imagine if you were to go to a dinner party only to
discover that all of the guests had decided to present their stories in
PowerPoint format. Yes, the evening would be informative, but it would
also be a bore.
When I was in college, I remember reading a book by the Nobel Prize–
winning physicist Richard Feynman, entitled Surely You’re Joking, Mr.
Feynman! What was interesting about the book was that it appeared to be
nothing more than a compilation of rambling anecdotes—about his personal
life, his teaching, his work. And yet the weight of these anecdotes crept up
on you, so that by the time you finished the book it was impossible to
regard it as anything less than a finely honed indictment of the scientific
discipline.
What Feynman seemed to understand was that there are in fact two ways
for a scholar to contribute to our understanding of something. The first is to
adopt the PowerPoint approach, which is to take a complex phenomenon
and attempt to distill it down to its core. The second is to do the reverse: to
take a complex phenomenon and attempt to shed new light on it, not by
removing information but by layering on unexpected shades of nuance,
from unexpected sources. This is what Feynman did: He wove his subject
into the broader tapestry of everyday life. He added richness, texture,
context. He was a man I wish I could have invited to dinner.
There are other examples of this, of scholars who have written books that
have influenced my own approach to writing. The physician Atul Gawande
has produced two books (Complications and Better) about medicine and the
health care system in this country. Gawande’s books are a complicated
brew—they touch on the professional and the personal, they are alternately
dispassionate and impassioned, and together they transformed the way I
thought about medicine. John Stilgoe has written a book entitled Outside
Lies Magic; it transformed the way I thought about modern architecture.
When I was a graduate student, Don Norman’s seminal The Design of
Everyday Things transformed the way I thought about technology and
function.
All of these works exist across wildly different disciplines, and yet they
have something very much in common: They were written by scholars who
were able to bring their respective disciplines to life, by humanizing them
somehow, without dumbing them down. Their relationship to their work is
akin to the one Calvin Trillin has to food, which is to say that they regard
their subject—whether it be medicine, or architecture, or technology—as
constituting one small piece of a much larger fabric. These are writers who
meander, certainly, but only as a means of getting straight to their point.
Meanwhile, they manage to be the opposite of pedantic, which is another
way of saying that they are comfortable with the knowledge that things can
be true and false at the same time.
Their books inspire, because although they provide a running
commentary of all that is wrong with their respective disciplines, they do
not stop there. I have always thought that the way to keep criticism from
devolving into cynicism is to make it the starting point rather than the
punctuation mark, and that’s what these writers do: They look hard to
identify the good amid the bad, and when they find it, they shine a light on
it, they celebrate it, they encourage us to learn from it. If scholarship is a
conversation, then in my mind these are the ones who make the most
compelling conversationalists—the ones braving the unfamiliar dialect, the
ones pushing the dialogue forward in unexpected and provocative ways.

I wrote this book because I believe that marketing has become the
soundtrack of our generation. It is setting the pulse, it is creating the rhythm
—not just for what we consume, but for what we crave, what we love and
what we hate. Against this backdrop, there are some insights that are not
well represented by linear thinking. And so this is a book full of
contradictions. Juxtapositions. Sideways connections.
In addition, every year, I tell my students that marketing is the only
function within the organization that is expressly designed to sit at the
intersection where business meets people. Real people. And the problem
with real people is that they don’t see the world the same way a
businessperson does. They don’t speak the language of bullet points; they
don’t organize the world into flowcharts and frameworks. People, real
people, view the world more organically. They are idiosyncratic. They are
unpredictable. They are beautifully disorganized.
This book could be described in much the same way. It is intimate. It is
organic. It is idiosyncratic. It’s even a bit disorganized. But in my mind,
that’s okay, because my aspiration is not to be deductive; it is to be
discursive in the unpredictable way that people are discursive. In business,
just as in life, sometimes the most illuminating insights can emerge from
the throwaways.
I should add that the nicest note I’ve ever received from a student was
one that said: “The difference between your course and every other one
taught at the Harvard Business School is that it was so human. It was a class
about us, disguised as lessons in business.”
That’s what this book is. It’s a book about us, disguised as lessons in
business.