Established industries often operate like cartels with unwritten rules, such as avoiding aggressive marketing. New entrants gain a significant edge by deliberately violating these norms, forcing incumbents to react to a game they don't want to play. This creates differentiation beyond the core product or service.

While product differentiation is beneficial, it's not always possible. A brand's most critical job is to be distinctive and instantly recognizable. This mental availability, achieved through consistent creative, logo, and tone, is more crucial for cutting through market noise than having a marginally different feature set.

When a brand name becomes a generic verb (e.g., "a Zoom meeting"), it creates immense awareness but can also trap the brand in its initial product category. This makes educating the market about a broader portfolio of offerings a significant challenge, turning the brand's greatest strength into a double-edged sword.

While adjacent, incremental innovation feels safer and is easier to get approved, Nubar Afeyan warns that everyone else is doing the same thing. This approach inevitably leads to commoditization and erodes sustainable advantage. Leaping to new possibilities is the only way to truly own a new space.

Instead of imitating successful competitors' tactics, deconstruct them to understand the underlying psychological principle (e.g., scarcity, social proof). This allows for authentic adaptation to your specific context, avoiding the high risk of failure from blind copying which ignores differences in brand and audience.

Many brands aspire to fit into the middle of their category, fearing that being too different will alienate consumers. This pursuit of the average leads to a sea of sameness, where entire industries—from cars to banks—lose their distinctiveness by copying category norms.

David Aaker posits that true market growth comes only from disruptive innovation, not from "my brand is better than yours" incrementalism. He criticizes seminal works on innovation for ignoring that branding is essential to position the new category, build barriers to entry, and make the innovation successful.

Instead of fighting for shelf space in traditional retail (a 'red ocean'), identify and create new, unconventional distribution points like hotels, airlines, or golf courses. This 'blue ocean' strategy builds a brand moat with less competition by reimagining where a product can live.

Many 'category creation' efforts fail because they just rename an existing solution. True category creation happens when customers perceive the product as fundamentally different from all alternatives, even without an official name for it. The customer's mental bucketing is the only one that matters.