Be Radically Unique

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January 23rd, 2009

The name George Kingsley Zipf is one you probably aren’t familiar with. Yet his observations more than a half-century ago proved prophetic in the world of marketing.

Zipf (1902-1950) was a philologist and professor at Harvard. He noted that the most popular word in the English language (“the”) is used ten times more than the tenth most-used word, 100 times more than the 100th most-used word, 1,000 time more than the 1,000th most-used word, etc.

So what does this have to do with marketing? Turns out the algorithm he discovered for the popularity of words is pretty much universal in all categories. What’s true with words is also true for consumer products and services. The #1 automobile model/hair gel/soft drink brand sells 10 times more than the 10th most popular, 100 times more than the 100th, etc. This phenomenon has come to be known as Zipf’s Law.

These findings, when combined with the realization that consumers really only have room in their conscious brain for 2 or 3 products per category, shows how perilous it is to settle for being number 10 in a category (or number four or even number three). Consider the category of online search. Chances are if I ask you to name a search engine, you’ll say Google. If I ask you for others, you may say Yahoo or MSN. If I ask you to name more, you’ll probably be stumped by the time you get to #5. The reason is, you have no reason to know five search engines.

With that in mind, what can you do to get in the top of the heap in your prospects’ minds? It is doubtful you’ll be able to get there by being “incrementally better” than the category leader. You have to offer a true difference. A meaningful, demonstrable difference. A game-changer. Something that is obvious, yet has somehow been overlooked by every other competitor in the category.

An example of this that comes to mind is Reef sandals (http://www.reef.com). Reef set out to make the “ultimate surfer sandal.” One of the things they did to make their sandals radically unique was to put a bottle opener right into the sole of the sandal. Brilliant! How many times have you been on the beach and had no way of opening that ice-cold bottle of Corona? Simple. Elegant. Obvious. And totally, radically unique. There is no other sandal like Reef. The company succeeded in changing the “sandal paradigm” of hard core surfers, and broke away from the pack. They gave their audience a reason to “move them up the ladder.”

I guarantee that if you spend as much time and effort thinking up ways to make your offerings “radically unique” as you now do to improve them incrementally, you’ll have way more to show for it.

Posted by Mickey