Moon, senior associate dean and chair of the MBA program at Harvard Business School, has a theory about differentiation that's worth hearing. She reckons that as a product category matures and the number of products within that category multiplies, the differences between them start to become increasingly trivial, almost to the point of preposterousness. "Try it", Professor Moon challenges (in her book 'Different: Escaping The Competitive Herd' , Crown Business, 2010). "Pick a random product category such as soap, or cereal, or shoes, and make a list of what is different amongst the products within the category. The list will probably be long, but an overwhelming number of these differences will almost certainly be trifling." The professor goes on to argue that there can come a point as a category matures when even the most frequent buyers stop believing the comparative difference is worth the effort: the homemaker who is willing to give the cheaper brand a try, the corporate road warrior who no longer cares about owning the latest mobile. This can, opines Professor Moon, be a dangerous inflection point in the life cycle of a category, when said category is composed of a shrinking number of devotees who are focused on differences that seem almost idiosyncratic, along with a growing number of customers who are beginning to suspect that the differences simply don't matter anymore. Her solution (and, thankfully, she does offer one, for those of us whose product categories are so lamentably grown up): that it may