Context is King!: Salience v. Differentiation.
Relative differentiation is the best path for most marketers.
The Big Idea: Sharp and Thomaz make good points, but Mark Ritson’s concept of “bothism” has worked for me.
Professor Felipe Thomaz has opinions on How Brands Grow and the work of Byron Sharp that have marketers debating the validity of a few marketing theories and ideas.
The big one is whether or not salience matters more than differentiation.
My take: I started in nightclubs in the mid-90s in South Florida.
All of the nightclubs I was involved with shared a few commonalities with all of the others that existed in South Florida at the time:
Cheap-ish booze
Loud music
Hopes of meeting up with some hot thing
My lessons here laid the foundation for my entire career in marketing and strategy:
Relative differentiation was the most important thing. We were all trading on similar currencies so we needed to offer something that made us unique at that moment in time. We did things like “everyone drinks free” during Spring Break.
Salience only mattered during peak season when the advertising of all the clubs increased. This was important because you were getting a new crop of college kids that might not be familiar with your club. So you need to raise the level of salience to reach a new cohort of college kids.
Most of the time, your differentiation came down to emotions and hormones. Were you going to be able to give a college kid the best chance to hook up and have a story to take back to campus? So, your relative differentiation was almost always built on emotion.
Dig Deeper: I talked about my lessons on pricing from nightclubs with Giles Edwards on his podcast.
The Big Take Home: Everything is relative.