Pitfalls of parity
by Brandon SchauerIt’s our human nature to emulate things that are good. It’s our nature to make things complete. But when forming a market strategy, these tendancies won’t help out much.
Too often companies go after market leaders by trying to reach parity in feature sets, or worse, by trying to do a little bit of everything. Below is a diagram analyzing the competitors in online photo sites circa early 2005. I’ve been using this diagram to show that you can compete smartly by not doing what your competitors are doing:
Obviously I didn’t include all the competitors in the space in an effort to keep the story simple; and here’s the story: Prior to Flickr, all the competition was focused on printing an a couple of other features. Sharing was under-developed. Rather than competing on printing, Flickr completely ignored this functionality until recently. Instead, Flickr blew the wheels off the competition in sharing. It follows a similar pattern with editing and uploading functionality.
Flickr may not have planned this approach from the start, but focusing on a different set of capabilities has helped make it more competitive. Looking at a market from this perspective can help avoid the pitfalls of parity.
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