Allan Talusan | Director of Growth
Good, better, best – never let it rest. Until your good is better and your better is best.
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Saint Jerome, 420 AD
Most marketing best practices are just a polite agreement to look like everyone else. Post at the optimal time. Use the proven subject line formula. Match the category color palette. Run the playbook your competitor is running, only slightly tighter. Follow enough of these and you will end up exactly where the rules promise to take you, the middle of the pack fighting harder to distinguish yourself from the brand beside you.
I am not against best practices at all. They keep the trains running. They stop you from making novice mistakes and they give nervous clients something to hold onto. But this should only be considered a floor, not a ceiling.
You do not want to compete in a sea of sameness. When every brand in a category optimizes toward the same "correct" answer. They start to all sound the same, look the same, and promise the same thing in slightly different fonts and b-roll. The customer, faced with near-identical options, does the only rational thing: they pick on price, or they don't pick at all.
The data is not subtle
If sameness feels like a soft problem, the numbers make it a hard one. Kantar, a global brand database, has studied this for decades. Their conclusion is definitive.
Difference is the single biggest driver of a brand's ability to grow.
In their analysis presented at Cannes Lions in 2023, "difference" accounted for roughly 25% of a brand's impact on market share outperformance. Brands with strong differentiators were twice as likely to grow as brands with weak differentiators. Data from BrandZ tells the same story:
“Brands perceived as both highly disruptive and genuinely different grew in brand value by 28%, while brands that scored low on both actually declined by 5%.”
Now read that again.
Playing it safe was not neutral. It was negative. The market punished the brands that worked hard to be unremarkable.
This is the gap between best practices and best of breed.
Best practices ask, "How do we match the standard?" Best of breed asks, "How do we make the standard irrelevant?" One is a strategy of catching up. The other is a strategy of pulling away.
Three brands that ignored the rules and won
The objection I hear most often is that this kind of boldness is a luxury for brands with enormous budgets.
It is the opposite.
Look closely at the brands that broke their categories open and you will find the boldness came first, and the money came as a result.
It was never about the money
Notice what these three brands did not have in common.
Dollar Shave Club had almost no budget. Patagonia had no interest in the standard growth tactics. Liquid Death sold a product with zero functional advantage. What they shared was nerve, and a refusal to let the category's unwritten rules write their strategy for them. The budgets followed the boldness, not the other way around.
This is the part that should reassure any client who feels out-spent:
You cannot out-spend the leader in your category. But you can almost always out-think them, because the leader is the one most trapped by best practices. Their size is built on the existing rules, so they are the least free to break them. That freedom is your advantage, and it is free.
Best of breed is not recklessness, though. None of these brands were random. Each one found the single honest thing that was true about them and that nobody else in the category was willing to say, then said it loudly. That is the real work: not chasing novelty for its own sake, but locating the blue ocean where the competition simply is not, and planting your flag there before anyone else thinks to.
A simple test
Pull up your last campaign, email, or commercial.
Now, put your competitor’s logo there.
Does it still work?
If it works, you’re suffering in the sea of sameness. Best practices will keep you safe, sure. But, in a market where difference drives growth and sameness quietly costs you, average is the riskiest place to stand.
Best of breed is what makes you worth remembering. Brands that win find the one true thing about themselves that the category is too scared to say out loud, and they say it without apologizing.
That thing exists inside your brand right now. If you are looking for a partner in finding your differentiator, let’s chat.
Sources
Kantar — Decoding Differentiation and BrandZ "Meaningful Difference" research
Inc. — How a $4,500 YouTube Video Turned Into a $1 Billion Company (Dollar Shave Club)
CNBC — Liquid Death CEO Mike Cessario on choosing "the dumbest possible name" for water
Sacra — Liquid Death revenue, valuation & funding
Patagonia — "Don't Buy This Jacket, Black Friday and The New York Times"
