Marty Neumeier The Good And Different Chart

This marketing author has been promoting his latest book on the speaker circuit. Here’s its 3-min youtube teaser slideshow.

One aspect I came across was his good & different chart. It’s got terrific ramifications for anyone selling a new product. You can find a fairly full description here, and below is my ‘different’ graphical representation.

The theory is that for something to be truly successful it must touch the uncomfortable chord melding being different with being good.

As a marketing aside this means that you must prototype and you must have real-life testing, even if only with ten people.

You have to know why your product is different, it has to be acknowledged as such by your target market, and crucially, you must “exaggerate” this difference when selling. This is the author’s own word, and rather than fib, I think he means to accentuate.

He finds that it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish between bad different and good different, so be on your guard for this border.

If your new wares are not both good and different then why are you bothering? Likewise if you have something shiny that is both good and different, then extract what makes it different and hammer it home.

Beware that this may not be as obvious as it seems. I feel that salespeople tend to settle on pitching the ‘good’. High quality, more power, longer lasting, cheaper, more stylish, greater functionality. Yet this particular marketing expert suggests that your stresses should be on the ‘different’. What’s its weird-factor? Why can it baffle? Why might you think it’s wrong?