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Online word-of-mouth is very powerful. These days customer service is one of the most important differentiation factors used by customers to pick one brand over others.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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You can’t ignore the importance of being unique, remarkable, and differentiated in a highly crowded market.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Launching a similar product still needs some kind of differentiation.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Can you guess what makes me choose other restaurants over vegan restaurants when there is a perfect match in my dietary needs and those restaurants’ offerings? It is the inability of most of the vegan restaurants to differentiate between the needs of a vegan who never had meat and a vegan who is not born as one but became one with time.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Put bluntly, the struggle that so many companies have to differentiate or communicate their true value to the outside world is not a business problem, it's a biology problem. And just like a person struggling to put her emotions into words, we rely on metaphors, imagery and analogies in an attempt to communicate how we feel. Absent the proper language to share our deep emotions, our purpose, cause or belief, we tell stories. We use symbols. We create tangible things for those who believe what we believe to point to and say, "That's why I'm inspired." If done properly, that's what marketing, branding and products and services become; a way for organizations to communicate to the outside world. Communicate clearly and you shall be understood.
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Simon Sinek (Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action)
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It's a fact...that in societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly. The effects of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization . Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It's what's known as 'the law of the market'...Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society.
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Michel Houellebecq (Whatever)
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Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago. —Warren Buffett
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Lora M. Cecere (Bricks Matter: The Role of Supply Chains in Building Market-Driven Differentiation (Wiley and SAS Business Series))
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The CEO of a major publishing house was concerned about the lack of creativity among his editorial and marketing staffs. He hired a group of high-priced psychologists to find out what differentiated the creative employees from the others. After studying the staff for one year, the psychologists discovered only one difference between the two groups: The creative people believed they were creative and the less creative people believed they were not.
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Michael Michalko (Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques)
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In today’s market, anything that isn’t differentiated through creativity or a 10x technology will be immediately commodified by the industrial system. The only way to sustainably incite your audience to take action is to inspire them with meaningful purpose.
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Alan Philips (The Age of Ideas: Unlock Your Creative Potential)
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most schools also focus too much on providing students with a set of predetermined skills, such as solving differential equations, writing computer code in C++, identifying chemicals in a test tube, or conversing in Chinese. Yet since we have no idea what the world and the job market will look like in 2050, we don’t really know what particular skills people will need. We might invest a lot of effort teaching kids how to write in C++ or speak Chinese, only to discover that by 2050 AI can code software far better than humans, and a new Google Translate app will enable you to conduct a conversation in almost flawless Mandarin, Cantonese, or Hakka, even though you only know how to say “Ni hao.
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
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mass times its acceleration—is a differential equation because acceleration is a second derivative with respect to time. Equations involving derivatives with respect to time and space are examples of partial differential equations and can be used to describe elasticity, heat, and sound, among other things.
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Gregory Zuckerman (The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution)
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Big Brother has no interest in well-informed citizens capable of critical thinking. Big Brother wants you to shop at Wal-Mart, where He will control the media that influences your life. The media works with the government and with the large corporations to form mass culture, which is utilized to create public consent, and most folks aren’t even aware of this process as it goes on all around them. Big Brother is actively seeking the complacency of the wage-slaves. Big Brother doesn’t want you to know about the spoken word performances given by Henry Rollins, or Jello Biafra or Terrence McKenna- or a thousand other people- because they will crack your laminate of societal posturing. Big Brother doesn’t want you to know about Bill Hicks, because Brother Bill will provide you with the courage and impetus to spit in Big Brother’s face. The internet is but one facet of our mass-marketed popular culture, and everyone is plugged into it. If you’re reading this, you are a part of it, the internet, one large hive mind, a singular consciousness. And that can be a good thing, but too often, people let themselves slip into it, into this world, to the point where they are no longer able to differentiate between what they think, what they know, and what is thrust upon them. They have no access to their own point of view, or their own spiritual consciousness, for lack of a better way to phrase it. So, to answer your question, in a lengthy and circuitous fashion, I would say that disgust with intellectual sloth, puerile voyeurism and dissent are the primary proponents in my work.
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Larry Mitchell
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But I was doing a bit of cleaning when you rang—the studio gets filthy—and the dust must have confused my powers of differentiation.
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Anthony Powell (A Buyer's Market (A Dance to the Music of Time #2))
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When positioning a brand, aggressively avoid becoming a "me too" by assertively being a "who else?
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Crystal Black Davis
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But differentiation loses its meaning when the features and functionality have exceeded what the market demands.
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Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change))
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Supply chain leaders manage complex systems with complex processes with increasing complexity. Leaders
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Lora M. Cecere (Bricks Matter: The Role of Supply Chains in Building Market-Driven Differentiation (Wiley and SAS Business Series))
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Time is money. If we could take one day of transit time out of the supply chain, we could free up $1 billion in cash. Unfortunately, we cannot.
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Lora M. Cecere (Bricks Matter: The Role of Supply Chains in Building Market-Driven Differentiation (Wiley and SAS Business Series))
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supply chain was and still is the silent enabler behind great companies, world economies, and successful communities. It
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Lora M. Cecere (Bricks Matter: The Role of Supply Chains in Building Market-Driven Differentiation (Wiley and SAS Business Series))
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Today, it is focused on not just building chains but also on the design of agile networks.
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Lora M. Cecere (Bricks Matter: The Role of Supply Chains in Building Market-Driven Differentiation (Wiley and SAS Business Series))
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Is my product compelling to our target customer? Have we made this product as easy to use as humanly possible? Will this product succeed against the competition? Not today’s competition, but the competition that will be in the market when we ship? Do I know customers who will really buy this product? Not the product I wish we were going to build, but what we’re really going to build? Is my product truly differentiated? Can I explain the differentiation to a company executive in two minutes? To a smart customer in one minute? To an industry analyst in 30 seconds?
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Marty Cagan (Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love)
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In a nutshell, Blue Ocean Strategy is about creating completely new industries through fundamental differentiation as opposed to competing in existing industries by tweaking established models. Rather than outdoing competitors in terms of traditional performance metrics, Kim and Mauborgne advocate creating new, uncontested market space through what the authors call value innovation.
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Alexander Osterwalder (Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers (The Strategyzer Series 1))
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The term supply chain is not new. It is fundamental to military strategy. It was the difference between winning and losing in the Napoleonic wars and the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. The
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Lora M. Cecere (Bricks Matter: The Role of Supply Chains in Building Market-Driven Differentiation (Wiley and SAS Business Series))
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The key to sustained and profitable growth is to find a repeatable formula that utilizes the most powerful and differentiated strengths in your core and applies them to a series of new "adjacent" markets.
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Chris Zook (Profit from the Core: A Return to Growth in Turbulent Times)
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Execution is the single greatest market differentiator. Great companies and successful individuals execute better than their competition. The barrier standing between you and the life you are capable of living is a lack of consistent execution.
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Brian P. Moran (The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months)
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It follows from Schopenhauer’s analysis that evert genuine work of art must have its origin in direct perception; that is to say it does not originate in concepts, and concepts are not what it communicates. This is what more than anything else differentiates good art from bad, or more accurately authentic from inauthentic art. The latter often originates in a desire on the part of the artist to meet some demand external to himself – to win approval, say, or be in the fashion, or supply a market – or else to put over a message of some sort. Such an artist starts by trying to thin what it would be a good idea to do – in other words, the starting point of the process for him is something that exists in terms of concepts. The inevitable result is dead art, of whatever kind, whether imitative, academic, commercial, didactic or fashion-conscious. It may be successful in its day because it meets the demands of its day, but once that day is over it has no inner life of its own with which to outlive it.
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Bryan Magee (The Philosophy of Schopenhauer)
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A third path that a business can follow—an offshoot of our two main strategies—is pursuing a highly targeted market and focusing its resources on serving that tight segment, whether through cost leadership or differentiation. This is the focus strategy.
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Anonymous
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The “quality revolution” in the latter half of the 20th century has taken us to a point where all products that reach a
supermarket shelf work. The competitive differentiators of the future will be products which are the most innovative, even though they may not be the best
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Gyan Nagpal (Talent Economics: The Fine Line Between Winning and Losing the Global War for Talent)
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How does Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw choose one idea over another? She asks herself seven questions. Do I have a basic understanding of the area? Do I know something about what is happening in the larger space of that idea? How will I build differentiation, particularly if the idea is a common product? How do I make it affordable and at the same time, deliver high value? Wherever there is a collaborator involved in the ideation process, how do I create larger leverage through the relationship beyond just that one idea? Do I know upfront who will be a paying customer and how I will go about marketing my idea? Finally, do I have conviction about the idea?
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Subroto Bagchi (THE HIGH PERFORMANCE ENTREPENEUR)
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With our desire to have more, we find ourselves spending more and more time and energy to manage and maintain everything we have. We try so hard to do this that the things that were supposed to help us end up ruling us.
We eventually get used to the new state where our wishes have been fulfilled. We start taking those things for granted and there comes a time when we start getting tired of what we have.
We're desperate to convey our own worth, our own value to others. We use objects to tell people just how valuable we are. The objects that are supposed to represent our qualities become our qualities themselves.
There are more things to gain from eliminating excess than you might imagine: time, space, freedom and energy.
When people say something is impossible, they have already decided that they don't want to do it.
Differentiate between things you want and things you need.
Leave your unused space empty. These open areas are incredibly useful. They bring us a sense of freedom and keep our minds open to the more important things in life.
Memories are wonderful but you won't have room to develop if your attachment to the past is too strong. It's better to cut some of those ties so you can focus on what's important today.
Don't get creative when you are trying to discard things.
There's no need to stock up.
An item chosen with passion represents perfection to us. Things we just happen to pick up, however, are easy candidates for disposal or replacement.
As long as we stick to owning things that we really love, we aren't likely to want more.
Our homes aren't museum, they don't need collections.
When you aren't sure that you really want to part with something, try stowing it away for a while.
Larger furniture items with bold colors will in time trigger visual fatigue and then boredom.
Discarding things can be wasteful. But the guilt that keeps you from minimizing is the true waste. The real waste is the psychological damage that you accrue from hanging on to things you don't use or need.
We find our originality when we own less.
When you think about it, it's experience that builds our unique characteristics, not material objects.
I've lowered my bar for happiness simply by switching to a tenugui. When even a regular bath towel can make you happy, you'll be able to find happiness almost everywhere.
For the minimalist, the objective isn't to reduce, it's to eliminate distractions so they can focus on the things that are truly important. Minimalism is just the beginning. It's a tool. Once you've gone ahead and minimized, it's time to find out what those important things are.
Minimalism is built around the idea that there's nothing that you're lacking. You'll spend less time being pushed around by something that you think may be missing.
The qualities I look for in the things that I buy are:
- the item has a minimalistic kind of shape and is easy to clean
- it's color isn't too loud
- I'll be able to use it for a long time
- it has a simple structure
- it's lightweight and compact
- it has multiple uses
A relaxed moment is not without meaning, it's an important time for reflection.
It wasn't the fallen leaves that the lady had been tidying up, it was her own laziness that she had been sweeping away.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
With daily cleaning, the reward may be the sense of accomplishment and calmness we feel afterward.
Cleaning your house is like polishing yourself.
Simply by living an organized life, you'll be more invigorated, more confident and like yourself better.
Having parted with the bulk of my belongings, I feel true contentment with my day-to-day life. The very act of living brings me joy.
When you become a minimalist, you free yourself from all the materialist messages that surround us. All the creative marketing and annoying ads no longer have an effect on you.
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Fumio Sasaki (Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism)