Innovation Cosplay: When "new" isn't really new at all

Not only is all of our innovation cosplay expensive and resource-consuming, but bias sees straight through these feeble efforts of us trying to be seen as new. Most of the time, what gets marketed as a breakthrough innovation isn't anything of the sort, is it? You know, if we strip away the glossy packaging and the press release verbiage, we're left with marginal improvements to a product that actually already exists. Maybe a slightly a faster processor or a marginally better interface or some feature that nobody will ever use. And the market responds with polite indifference and then completely forgets us. We're optimizing for the wrong thing. Buyers don't respond to novelty. New is nothing more than a timestamp expiring the moment somebody else comes up with something even newer. Different, on the other hand, forces people to change how they think about a problem that's being solved. Continually chasing the new inevitably means racing to be first with minor improvements. Being different means accepting that most of the market won't initially get what we're doing. Now, since most of us can't handle that possibility, we end up defaulting to safe iterations. Of what already works, which is how entire categories end up interchangeable and providers blend into each other. We've convinced ourselves that broader appeal equals better strategy, so we sand down every edge until there's nothing left worth grabbing. Now, the logic, you know, it seems reasonable in that buyers respond to certain features, so we should probably add those as well, right? Market leaders position themselves a particular way, so maybe we do the same. But the thing is, after a short while, entire industries look like they've went through a photocopier, and we're scratching our heads wondering why our meticulously crafted improvements aren't moving the revenue needle. It's because buyers don't evaluate marginal superiority when everything else looks identical. They default to whatever they know, whoever they've heard of, whoever's cheapest, whoever they're already using because switching feels like too much of a headache. The improvements that we're shouting about don't register to buyers as improvements. They see them as simply adding to the noise that everybody else is already making. New is additive. We take what we— what already exists and make it marginally better, faster, with more more features. Different, on the other hand, is either subtractive or reframing everything. Different either removes what everybody assumed all this time was necessary, or it changes how people think about the problem they're solving. When something's genuinely different, it can't be directly compared because the comparison framework doesn't exist yet. Now that's majorly uncomfortable for buyers at the beginning, but it's also why different things get remembered while new things are forgotten. The discomfort we're avoiding by playing it safe is exactly what creates memorability. The things that changed how we think about a category stick around in our memory even after they've been copied by somebody else. The market rewards breaking the pattern more than insignificant incremental improvements to the existing one. You know, we can watch this play out in how categories evolve. Someone introduces something genuinely different, right? You know, we look at it and it seems a bit weird at first. It doesn't even look like it belongs in the category. But then it starts gaining traction with buyers who were underserved or who didn't realize they had a problem until someone reframed it. Then all of a sudden competitors start noticing and they start copying certain elements, and then after a few years what was different becomes a new normal and the category reforms around it. The thing is, what was different at first continues to maintain that advantage even after everybody else starts copying it, because buyers remember who changed their thinking. The copiers get lumped together as followers, even if they're technically superior across measurable ways. This isn't about being first to market as much as being first to be different in a way that actually matters to buyers. The human memory doesn't work by cataloguing marginal differences between similar options. The mind remembers things by noticing breaks in a particular pattern. When we, when we make our offering slightly better than competitors in predictable ways, We're making it harder for buyers to remember us, not easier. The businesses that end up dominating categories usually weren't the first to market, were they? They were the first to be different in a way that forced buyers to reconsider what they thought they needed or how they thought about solving their problem, right? Apple didn't invent the first computer or the first MP3 player. Dyson didn't invent the vacuum cleaner. That kind of positioning requires conviction most leadership teams don't have the guts for. It means saying no to opportunities that don't fit the strategy, and accepting that some buyers won't get it, and to be okay with that because those guys aren't the right type of buyers that we're going for. We're building for a specific point of view rather than trying to accommodate every possible preference. Which gets us back to why innovation cosplay is everywhere. Which is simply because it's safer. It's easier to justify. We just tell our boss or our shareholders to look at what the competition is doing and tell them that we're doing what they're doing, just marginally better. We present incremental improvements as progress without risk that makes boardrooms nervous. Job done. Right? But buyers see through this nonsense instantly. They can tell when we're following instead of leading. When our innovation is actually nothing more than feature parity with a competitor. We just call it something different. We've optimized for not offending anyone instead of strongly appealing to someone specific. That's why so many product launches disappear without a trace. We've trained ourselves to compete on dimensions that don't actually matter to customers, while we continue to ignore the ones that do. We need to force buyers into thinking differently, thinking the way that we do about what they're accomplishing. Of course, whenever there's a management meeting about this, there's always someone somewhere who's going to ask, "Well, why aren't we including the table stakes features?" You know, they'll be concerned that we're being too specific. And narrowing our addressable market. Then somebody else will point to a competitor's success and suggest we do something similar. Now, don't get me wrong, these concerns are real. Risk exists by being different, which means it may not work. That's why we call it risk, right? The clue's in the name. But the reason most differentiation attempts fail is because while they're different, they're different in ways that buyers don't actually care about. The problem is the only alternative today is guaranteed mediocrity, competing in crowded category middles where any advantage goes to the biggest budget or whoever got there first. Most businesses will keep chasing the new. They'll iterate on what already exists, make some marginal improvements, and continue to wonder why their market position doesn't actually move much. Category middles stay crowded with indistinguishable options. But that leaves space for anyone willing to be actually different. I don't mean by being contrarian for its own sake, but by being different because we've identified something buyers care about that everybody else ignores. We want to be the different that repels the wrong buyers and appeals to the right ones. If our product doesn't force buyers to think differently about what they're solving, we're competing on everybody else's terms. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, please pass it on. I'm not saying I'm right. I'm saying many out there are wrong. Please subscribe, share, comment, whatever works for you. Find out more at kexino.com. That's K-E-X-I-N-O. Hope to see you again here soon.