Andrew Ehrenberg

In practice, competitive brands are mostly very similar. Michael Porter’s “sustainable competitive advantage” suffers from two disadvantages: Competitive advantages seldom exist; and if they do, they are rarely sustainable.

Almost any difference between brands that makes a difference in sales gets copied very quickly. “The trends in our technology lead to competing products being more and more the same,” the famed advertising guru James Webb Young said 80 years ago. But Young had the wrong causal explanation — the mimicking was due to competition, as it is now, and not to the latest technology of the early 1920s. Competition consists of not letting your competitors be effectively different or better, thus preventing them from getting or staying ahead.

It’s not that serious product differentiation is at all difficult to achieve. There is in fact much of it around. Most competitive brands, however, do not sport any uniquely effective product attribute — if they did, it would be copied.

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