Differentiate or Die: Survival in Our Era of Killer Competition Book

Marketing guru Jack Trout has made a very handsome living by saying the same thing over and over for decades. "Be different" is the mantra that has run through books such as Marketing Warfare and the best selling Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. "Being different is at the heart of everything we've done for almost 30 years", he admits. Well he's at it again with Differentiate Or Die. But the strange thing is that every time he repeats his argument, it is truer and more relevant than the time before. With business now a global-free-for-all conducted at the speed of thought, with consumers deluged by a proliferation of choice, being different has become a necessary (if not sufficient) condition for corporate survival.Trout makes the case with customary panache and his easy-reading opinionated style is both entertaining and informative. In the first third of the book he wades through a hate-list of things that are not differentiating ideas. Top of his "not" chart lies his bête noire, "quality and customer orientation". Reward schemes, better service and customer satisfaction are all dismissed with a casual side-swipe as either counterproductive or merely the basic minimum requirement of being in business. "You can indeed use this [service as a differentiator] as a strategy. But only if your competition is stupid enough to let you", carps Trout. The same goes for creativity--boy does he hate "creativity", price and "breadth of line". He then spends most of the rest of the book offering fertile ground upon which businesses can differentiate themselves. These include being first, attributing ownership, leadership, heritage, speciality, manufacture and topicality. Finally he concludes with an awful warning on the need to maintain absolute focus--your difference should be expressed in just one word--and the danger of growth, which is that it destroys differentiation.Trout is contentious, provocative and almost certainly right in everything he says about the need for differentiation to lie at the heart of corporate strategy. Differentiate or Die is a must read for all non-marketers in business and a useful refresher for those who think they already know it. --Alex BenadyRead More