Youngme Moon > Quotes

“But to be a parent is to live in the past-present-future all at once. It is to hug your children and be intensely aware of how much smaller they felt last year ... even as you wonder how much bigger they will feel the next. It is to be a time-shifter, to marvel at the budding of their intellect, their verbal dexterity, their sense of humor ... at the same time rewinding and fast-forwarding ... to when they were younger, to when they'll be older. It is to experience longing for the here and now, which I know sounds flaky - sort of like complaining about being homesick when you're already home - but can happen, trust me, when you live in multiple time zones all at once.”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“The age of abundance is over, I remember thinking, not because things are no longer abundant, but because abundance has lost its status as our reigning aspiration.”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“When I hear people say that time moves faster as you get older, I think they have it wrong. It’s not that time moves any faster; it’s that time collapses altogether.”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“When we are surrounded by conformity, by homogeneity, we all look for ways to create a little chafe.”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“where a connoisseur sees the differences, a novice sees the similarities. Where a connoisseur can discern subtle shades of distinction based on nuanced asymmetries, a novice lacks the necessary filters to canvas, to organize, to sift an assortment in a meaningful way. Where a connoisseur can navigate a category with effortless intuition, a novice will struggle to find beginning, middle, or end.”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“When all the world’s a stage, everything becomes a study in impression management; everything becomes the modern-day answer to the question What do I want the world to think of me? Which is partly why the internet has become such a treasure trove for business—it’s become the place where citizens congregate to market themselves to the world.”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“In fact, if I had to identify the secret of IKEA’s appeal, here’s what I’d say: IKEA is a brand that has discovered the cool of unapologetic contradiction. It is stingy; it is indulgent. It says yes; it says no. It strips things down; it sweetens things up. It has stumbled upon a dialectic, and it has somehow figured out how to make that dialectic sing.”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“jaded is the new stoned.”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“every year, I tell my students that marketing is the only function within the organization that is expressly designed to sit at the intersection where business meets people. Real people. And the problem with real people is that they don’t see the world the same way a businessperson does.”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“In any event, when businesses engage in augmentation-by-addition, the idea is to please customers by giving them what they expect, plus more:”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“And yet in too many cases, this is what business has been reduced to: the artful packaging of meaningless distinctions as true differentiation.”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“there are two kinds of difference. There is a kind of difference that says nothing, and there is a kind of difference that speaks volumes.”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“Stillness seems to have the effect of easing the senses, until it starts to dull them. So while most of us need our lives to be filled with a modicum of stability, we need there to be some motion, too, for no other reason than it’s during these episodes of activity that we’re able to feel our synapses firing again, sometimes even with the abandon of the children we used to be.”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“This is another reason why I am drawn to breakaway brands: They are a reminder of the extent to which the marriage of unlikely things—whether they be product categories, or musical genres, or personality characteristics for that matter—can cast new light on them, and cast new light on us as well.”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“This is what reverse brands do: They take away what we expect, but then give us what we don’t. They say no where others say yes, but they also say yes where others say no. The result is a value proposition that feels almost “inside-out” to us.”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“Reverse brands create a kind of tilt in the surface—of progress, of evolution, of expectation. They draw us down a divergent path by applying pressure in exactly the place where we least anticipate it.”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“IKEA is a brand that has discovered the cool of unapologetic contradiction.”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“I’ve decided to wait until next year before I buy a new X because I know the Xs next year will be so much better,” what you are hearing is someone articulate what we all take for granted: When it comes to product evolution, we leave it to firms to deliver the future perfect, and we’re complacent in the knowledge that they know we expect it of them, too.”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“this is what reverse brands do: They eliminate, but they also elevate. They strip things down, even as they sweeten things up. The result is a fusion of the basic with the sublime, a fusion that may seem strange, unfamiliar, or even disconcerting at first encounter—but is nothing if not distinctive.”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“What’s interesting is that this doesn’t mean that these brands are necessarily “better” or “worse” than other offerings in the market. It does, however, mean that they are differentiated—differentiated in a way that allows them to cultivate a different relationship with their customers, differentiated in a way that allows them to stand apart from the herd.”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“start to adopt a consumption posture directed toward the category as a whole,”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“Instead, hostile brands present us with obstacles. The obstacle may be the size of a car, the uncomely look of a shoe, the inaccessibility of a store, regardless—to own a piece of the brand, we must be willing to incur the tax of ownership. We’ve got to put ourselves through the soup line.”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“What this means is that a careful examination of these outliers can yield telling insights. It’s easy to forget that this has always been true. Anyone can learn how to write or paint or play music, but the virtuosos who have historically merited our most thorough exegesis have been those who were willing to stretch the boundaries of text, of music, of art, in new directions. In field after field, past experience has taught us that the ones to pay attention to are the ones who understand the rules so well that they also understand the urgency to break them. These are the players who force us to confront the frailty of our assumptions.”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“To be sure, there have always been certain categories that have been considered to be naturally and inherently incompatible with brand loyalty. Two types of categories come to mind here: (1) categories in which there is no obvious brand variety, such as sugar or bond paper or gas stations, and (2) categories in which there is almost infinite variety, such as restaurants or wine or books.”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“Stillness seems to have the effect of easing the senses, until it starts to dull them.”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“Hostile brands are brands that play hard to get. Instead of laying down the welcome mat, they lay down a gauntlet. It’s almost as if the managers behind these brands took out a marketing textbook and added negatives to every sentence. In this regard, hostile brands don’t market in the classical sense of the term; they anti-market.”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“The truth of the matter is, true differentiation—sustainable differentiation—is rarely a function of well-roundedness; it is typically a function of lopsidedness”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“all of us only dared to ever speak or write or put forth the things we knew to be unassailable, then we really wouldn’t have much of interest to contribute at all.”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“What this implies is that when it comes to our consumption preferences, what we want tomorrow is probably going to be informed by what we have too much of today. It is only when we are drowning in choices that we are going to feel liberated when someone takes them away. It’s only when we’re feeling suffocated by customer service that we’re going to feel grateful for its absence. Less is more only when more has become a commodity.”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

“The act of measurement changes the behavior of the thing being measured.”
― Youngme Moon, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd