ZAG: The #1 Strategy of High-Performance Brands

Differentiation, the art of standing out from the competition, is not front-page news. What IS front-page news, in a world of extreme clutter, is that you need more than differentiation. You need RADICAL differentiation. The new rule: When everybody zigs, zag.

If nobody’s doing it, you’d be crazy to do it yourself, right? Wrong.

Instead, a brand is a customer’s gut feeling about a product, service, or company.

He learned how to find the spaces between the fielders.

To delight customers so that MORE people buy MORE things for MORE years at a HIGHER price.

The human mind deals with clutter the best way it can—by blocking most of it out. What gets in, those items that seem most useful or interesting, are labeled and stored in little mental boxes. Once a label goes on and a box is filled, the mind resists making changes to it.

notably unhelpful for encouraging innovation. This is because radical differentiation doesn’t test well in focus groups.

brand-building isn’t a series of isolated activities, but a complete system in which five disciplines—differentiation, collaboration, innovation, validation, and cultivation—combine to produce a sustainable competitive advantage.

Radical differentiation, on the other hand, is about finding a whole new market space you can own and defend,