Can Geniuses Stay Geniuses?
I had an interesting discussion with a friend about the Genius model of a product. The Genius, you’ll recall, is a product that thinks about a problem in a new way. The Swiffer, the iPod, Trader Joe’s - all Geniuses. They’re different, a little idiosyncratic, and a consumer must get used to the way they do things - but once the initial barriers are passed, and the consumer sees the light, the Genius product seems like the only way to solve the problem. Everything else is old fashioned and bogged down.
But what happens to a market after a Genius is introduced? If the competitive advantage is a new way of doing things, how can a product maintain that difference once competitors latch on?
In the case of the Swiffer, the difference disappears - Clorox and other competitors introduced Swiffer-like product almost immediately, and although P&G has done a fantastic job of keeping “Swiffer” in the front of consumer’s minds, it’s not clear that the products and its competitors are all that differentiated in the mind of the consumer. Swiffer is built on an observation: people don’t want to get dirty while cleaning. It’s easy for competitors to make the same observation and generate products that deliver the same benefit, once they figure it out.
In the case of the iPod, though, Apple has managed to keep its distance - the things that make it a Genius (like seamless integration) require strategies that its competitors prefer not to adopt (like a closed system). What we have seen in the MP3 market, though, are other products using the Genius model, in different directions. The Sansa Connect, for instance, offers the promise of wireless connectivity to a vast collection of music, and a subscription model that lets you listen to whatever you want without buying it. It’s a completely different model than the iPod, but Genius in its own way. The current implementation isn’t perfect, and the product doesn’t seem to be catching on, but it’s a great example of two Genius products in the same market, neither diminishing the other’s specialness through imitation.
So I don’t think that the Genius model must necessarily fade - or switch to the Star model, competing on one feature like price or capacity. But retaining the Genius edge requires the product to be built on Genius principles.
