Harvard’s Moon: Ignore Your Critics to Win

Professor/Author Offers Creatives Food for Thought

By Marisa Guthrie -- Multichannel News, 10/25/2010 12:01:00 AM

New Orleans — If you want to set yourself apart from the herd, embrace your negatives, ignore your critics, and, above all, don’t listen to your customers.

So said Harvard Business School’s Youngme Moon during a lively opening session on day two of the CTAM Summit.

If it wasn’t exactly a touchy-feely paean to the dogged determination of the American business community to super-serve customers, her talk offered food for thought for a CTAM community that also prizes creativity.

The incredible array of choices available to consumers, Moon asserted, and the drive of businesses to stay hyper-competitive have pounded every product and service into a remarkable “sameness.”

“And what’s perplexing is everyone … cares so deeply about diff erentiation. They’re not only committed to it, they are somewhat obsessed with it. It’s all they want to talk about,” she said. “And yet … all I see around me is sameness.”

Case in point: shopping for new furniture. It is a task consumers avoid because all around them are similar looking furniture retailers off ering an enormous yet similar selection of sofas and dining-room tables and homogenous services (free delivery, lifetime guarantee). This creates dissonance.

“You find yourself resenting the burden that you’re going to be stuck with a living room set for the rest of your life … you surround your customers with helpful benefits, and they complain about those benefits,” Moon said.

“It is a classic case of the cure devolving into the disease,” she added.

Companies that have truly caught fire, that have energized consumers and inspired rabid brand loyalty, are ones that say no to their customers, Moon said.

Some examples:

Ikea. “A trip to Ikea can be an enormous hassle. There is very little stylistic differentiation. Good luck finding sales people at Ikea.” And then there is the “monumental” task of putting the store’s furniture together when you get home. Ikea “refuses to give its customers benefits that its competitors routinely give their customers.”

The Mini Cooper. It was introduced eight years ago, before the economic recession and the implosion of the U.S. auto industry, when monster gas-guzzlers were still flying off car dealer lots. And yet the entire marketing campaign for the Mini Cooper emphasized its tiny size.

Apple. “Apple’s willingness to forge an independent path almost necessitates that it be willing to ignore what the world is telling it to do,” Moon said of the iPod and iPad originator.

Twitter. “The thing that the critics laughed at the most was the 140-character limit.” But it is precisely that small-bite approach to news and social networking that has made the difference, catapulting the company into the Zeitgeist in a few short years.

“If you want to be different,” said Moon, “you must be willing to ignore your critics and, in some cases, your customers, too.”

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Marisa Guthrie is programming editor of B&C.