Intentional growth, part 2: Cultivating your edge
Part 2:
Cultivating your edge
Practical pathways to digital differentiation
4 avenues to differentiation
In part 1, we discussed how even the most ambitious companies can fall into common pitfalls: aimless featuring, unconvincing cloning, and confident stagnating. Meaningful, long-lasting products never stop innovating. Whether small tweaks or big leaps, they follow a combination of four avenues for continual experience improvement.
01 Know your hero, Amplify it
Identify the primary reason customers love your product and make it even better. Center your ecosystem on this emotional driver to reveal new opportunities within your brand orbit.
This is Nike expanding into digital services, Amazon branching out from books, Uber adding Eats, or Apple bringing the magic of “it just works” to an entire ecosystem of devices.
Sephora amplifies personal connections
A lot of brands have loyalty programs and points, but the genius behind our collaboration with Sephora was to utilize the strength of in-person connection. With the brick and mortar landscape rapidly changing, we empowered Sephora to strengthen their relationship with customers by thinking about their shopping channels more holistically, and leaning into their brand equity as the beauty authority. By utilizing the deep knowledge of team experts both in-store and online for questions and trusted advice, Sephora’s Beauty Insider Community has become a benchmark for brand loyalty programs; they even nearly doubled their membership in the last few years.
Beauty Insider connects the brand to over 40 million members and has yielded an over 50% increase in upsell.
Happy customers invest in you
Amplifying your hero creates deeper customer loyalty, and identifies opportunities for additional services your fans might love to have in your ecosystem.
02 Nail the table stakes
Use surgical UX fixes to address small experience gaps, user friction, micro-interactions, and missed opportunities to create a valuable, intuitive, seamless experience. Ensure the desired, but expected, features are knocked completely clear of the ballpark.
This is DuoLingo continuing to refine the proven model of gamified learning, SquareSpace evolving their creation engine over two decades, or in the physical world, OXO ceaselessly improving on the design value of Good Grips.
Microsoft Office ceaselessly evolves
How is the Microsoft Office suite still relevant after nearly 4 decades?! You might complain about confusing interactions, feature bloat, or tedious menu’s (and you’d be right). But at the end of the day, Office has consistently evolved to meet new table-stakes needs: cloud collaboration, richer design considerations, updated templates, evolving Teams in the midst of a global pandemic… the list goes on.
Office is a tool for the masses and no competitor has successfully one-up’d Microsofts ease of use, rich feature set, or flexible affordances in a way that disrupts Office’s caché completely.
Customers don't like leaving a great product that meets their needs
Ensuring your product or service meets customers most important needs in the most seamless, joyful way possible, makes it more painful to switch away to a new system, especially if your competitor is only marginally better.
03 Outclass a core differentiator
Outclass your competitor on their own hero feature in a way they won’t easily be able to match. This requires knowing your own strengths intimately as well as the core emotions and mindsets underlying why customers go to your competitors.
This is Netflix improving on Tivo, iPhone outclassing Blackberry, Zoom evolving Skype from video-calls to video-classrooms and webinars.
Figma enhances design collaboration
Sketch’s advantage over Photoshop et. al. was components and libraries and syncing files… but syncing was kind of a pain, and it slowed down collaboration. figma saw the opportunity to outclass Sketch with seamless collaboration, cloud-native syncing, and better built-in prototyping. As a new entrant, they weren’t beholden to a dated tech-stack and weren’t afraid to take a novel approach Sketch didn’t want to risk.
Sketch eventually caught up with real-time collaboration, in-app prototyping, and seamless dev handoff… but only after losing significant market share to Figma. When it comes to innovation, you may need to fix things before they break.
What people love, but better and easier, is always a good thing
Getting out of nit-picky feature comparisons to dazzle users with the best version of the 2 to 3 things they really care about is a much easier buy than touting marginal improvements.
04 Chart new waters
Uncover the richest unmet opportunities, innovate your way into a class of your own by designing the future before it exists. Finding an uncharted ocean is difficult. It requires knowing customers needs intimately and deep creativity to design new and better ways to meet those needs.
This is AirBnB making it almost too easy to start running a Bed & Breakfast, Uber solving the frustrating lack of clarity when calling a cab, or PayPal powering seamless transactions anywhere on the internet.
Gatorade Gx pioneers hydration biometrics
Dehydrated athletes get injured more frequently. But hydration needs depend dramatically on each athletes unique physiology. Some people just sweat more, or saltier. Rather than compete with UA, Nike, Peloton, MFP, MRK, etc. on the same set of features (workouts, calorie tracking, etc.) Gatorade pioneered an entire new biometric: the sweat rate, giving athletes insight into how they sweat, unlocking personalized hydration.
The Gx ecosystem now encapsulates multiple products that all work together to help athletes hydrate for their body’s unique need. Oh and it’s the #1 selling product at the largest sports retailer in the US.
Lasting differentiation starts with unmet needs
There are only so many ways to compete to provide the same kinds of services. Lasting differentiation always comes from creative, masterfully designed solutions to salient needs. While bucking the trend involves risks, it starts with a full understanding your audience’s needs, behaviors, and motivations.
Finding clarity is easier than it seems
How do you know where to start and which directions to invest in? How do you discover and create a cohesive product strategy that avoids the pitfalls of franticly featuring, unconvincingly cloning, or confidently stagnating? While it’s hard to nail, it’s easy to get started.
Start by surveying the field
A quick landscape audit can help you know your competitors, know the trends, but most importantly, to know yourself. You’ll be able to answer a few key questions about your current competitive positioning:
1. What is your hero? Where are your experience gaps?
2. What are the table-stakes across the market? What are the key differentiators?
3. Where are there uncontested opportunities?
While truly understanding your customers will always be the driving force behind a successful product strategy, an honest understanding of your position in your users competitive landscape is instrumental in avoiding pitfalls on your path to differentiation.