It's just a matter of knowing how to do it. You can't do it, he warns, on the basis of creativity and rarely with price, breadth of product line, quality or customer orientation. Instead, build your differentiation strategy around being first, owning a particular attribute, leadership, heritage, market specialty, how your product is made, being the latest or being the hottest. The irony is that differentiation leads to success and success leads to growth. And guess what.
Growth can destroy differentiation.
Maintaining your differentiated position requires tough choices, consistency, and putting top people in charge of protecting it. If your difference is that your product can do a lot of things not very well as opposed to a product that does one thing exceptionally well, you haven't got much of a difference. Most people lead with one of these four styles when making decisions. Intuitives are interested in the big picture and what's coming next. Thinkers want a lot of information.