Distinguishable Difference?

We're embarking on an adventure this week at WFS.  We'll be reading the book entitled "Different" by Youngme Moon.  When I saw "we", of course I mean me, but I will be discussing it with Scott and our crew when I finish reading it. I became fascinated by watching this video, found on a Google + post by Mari Smith, and I can't stop thinking about the book.  I'm thinking about all the ways that WFS truly is a different sort of retail store, and that many of our ideas, such as what I term "cooperative commerce", are innovative. 

I'm excited to read "Different".  I'll leave you here with a little taste of the book, and when I finish it, I'll report back to you on how much I liked it.  I'll also be pointing out what I learned from it, and how I think our store can benefit from the information.  Or maybe, it'll be how our community can benefit.....we'll see.

 -----------------------------------------"Different" by Youngme Moon--------------------------------------------------

"There is perhaps no better way to get a glimpse into the mass consumption values of a culture than to visit the place where the inhabitants of that culture purchase the stuff of daily living—soap, food, shoes. If aliens were to visit a grocery store or a drugstore in this country, they would have to conclude that we are a people hooked on the pleasures of picking needles out of haystacks—of selecting a cereal among an ocean of cereal boxes, of selecting a bar of soap among an ocean of soap bars. And in many ways, they would be right. We take for granted how frequently we thrust ourselves into the position of having to make purchase decisions in the face of overflowing product profusion."

"There are truisms in business, just as there are truisms in sport, in play, and in life—self-evident, obvious truths that require little or no persuasion. Buy low, sell high. Know thy competition. Listen to your customers. These are the axioms that have not only achieved the status of conventional wisdom in the world of commerce, they have become part of our modern business reflex. And because these wisdoms have become congenital almost, when they are called into question, we tend to be not just defensive, but dismissive."

"The metaphor should be obvious. The central premise in part 1 of this book is that in so many consumer categories, differentiation has become hard to come by because we have fallen into a pulse of competition that in and of itself has become an impediment to its emergence. In part 1, I also contend that businesses that find themselves locked into this particular pattern of competitive engagement have become masters at producing product categories filled with heterogeneous homogeneity, or dissimilar clones if you will. Which is to say that they have become masters of a particular form of imitation. Not differentiation, but imitation. Yet because this particular form of imitation is cloaked in the vernacular of differentiation, the myth of competitive separation lives on in the minds of the managers running these firms. Meanwhile, the emperor has no clothes and most consumers know it."

"....As a percentage, the number of companies who are truly able to achieve competitive separation in their respective categories—to break through the noisy clutter, to create genuine emotional resonance with consumers—is depressingly small, and yet these outliers have much to teach us about the limitations of some of our most deeply held business assumptions. So while part 1 of this book may read like a critique, part 2 will read very much like a celebration, of these iconoclasts and their ways of doing business."
  

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Oh man....I'm really looking forward to this!

Have a fantastic week, my friends!


Lori & Scott