Negative trade-offs are not only a marker of excellence, they are a marker of differentiation. This is as true for products and brands as it is for brain surgeons.

The idea brands that I’m going to introduce you to represent the teardown approach; they offer a whole-scale rethinking of the value proposition in their respective categories. What this means is that they owe their existence to no insignificant amount of conceptual inspiration. Someone, somewhere, had to actually sit down and imagine what a radica

What this implies is that when it comes to our consumption preferences, what we want tomorrow is probably going to be informed by what we have too much of today. It is only when we are drowning in choices that we are going to feel liberated when someone takes them away. It’s only when we’re feeling suffocated by customer service that we’re going to

The truth of the matter is, true differentiation—sustainable differentiation—is rarely a function of well-roundedness; it is typically a function of lopsidedness.

A posted declaration such as “I couldn’t live without my caffeine and my Converse All-Stars,” is seldom as offhand as it appears. Indeed, when it comes to the performance art known as social networking, it can sometimes feel as if there’s nothing but marketing going on—people playing publicist, working for themselves.

These are the brands that I’m inclined to pay the most attention to: the ones that treat our expectations as nothing more than straw men. They recognize that the challenge is to render our expectations irrelevant in the context of what else they are offering, and so they take it upon themselves to offer us an alternative reality to our established

In fact, if I had to identify the secret of IKEA’s appeal, here’s what I’d say: IKEA is a brand that has discovered the cool of unapologetic contradiction. It is stingy; it is indulgent. It says yes; it says no. It strips things down; it sweetens things up. It has stumbled upon a dialectic, and it has somehow figured out how to make that dialectic

Reverse brands create a kind of tilt in the surface—of progress, of evolution, of expectation. They draw us down a divergent path by applying pressure in exactly the place where we least anticipate it.

When a category has reached the point when it’s possible to make fun of the people who still believe in the differences across products, it has reached the point of what I refer to as heterogeneous homogeneity: The differences are there, but they are lost in a sea of sameness.