Beat Competitors By a Little

Small differences can be persuasive.

Which option would you choose:

• Trip to Rome
• Trip to Paris + $1

Both options are so unique that $1 is meaningless.

But choose again:

• Trip to Paris
• Trip to Paris + $1

Well, now it's different. If options are highly similar, a minuscule difference can matter. Try highlighting similarities between your product and a competitor, then show a positive difference in your product.

You just need a tiny difference.

Consider a smartphone with a 30-hour battery. Customers will prefer a competitor with a longer battery regardless of this size difference (e.g., 31-hour, 40-hour). It's called positive contrast scope-insensitivity (Voichek & Novemsky, 2024).

Customers initiate a comparison:

• Hmm, is this option better or worse?

But they prematurely stop this assessment if the option is better:

• If better: Great!
• If worse: Hmm, by how much?

Ultimately, features are rarely evaluated by how much they're better. Only by how much they're worse.

How to Apply

• Prioritize New Benchmarks. Customers are insensitive to the size of advantages. Once you surpass an industry metric, focus on beating a new metric. Persuade customers with the number of benchmarks you beat, rather than superiority within benchmarks.
• Prioritize Weak Features. Weaknesses are influenced by severity, so prioritize features that are underperforming by a wide margin.
• Differentiate Any Feature. Folgers differentiated their coffee as flaked crystals, even though this feature was meaningless for taste. Likewise, a jacket with alpine class down fill seemed better than regular down filling even though customers were told that this feature was irrelevant to functionality (Carpenter et al., 1994).

• Carpenter, G. S., Glazer, R., & Nakamoto, K. (1994). Meaningful brands from meaningless differentiation: The dependence on irrelevant attributes. Journal of marketing research, 31(3), 339-350.
• Voichek, G., & Novemsky, N. (2024). Positive Contrast Scope Insensitivity. Journal of Consumer Research, ucae052.