To succeed in marketing, your brand needs to be noticed in rush hour. Differentiation is key.

Standing out in rush hour is not easy...

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In some training I used to do on advertising, I used to talk about how there is roughly 365 new skincare/ personal care products and extensions launched every year. 


This meant that on average your new product or extension would only be new for a day. And so within 24 hours there would be something new.


However, it gets worse and worse every day as companies seek growth in these tough times and are trying to bring more and more new products to market. In fact, latest data shows that at least 850 new personal care products are launched per year. That means you are only new for less than half a day if you are lucky.....

And if you launch in the mass market channels in most countries, all the launches are crammed into only 2 launch month in many cases. As the large supermarket and drug stores want to keep the logistics and workload of changing shelf layouts across thousands of stores to as manageable a process as possible

So when agencies talk about clutter, they really mean it. Not only is there clutter in the amount of messages that the consumer is seeing every day, but there are hundreds of different and new things for people to explore constantly.


But it does mean that whatever you do, you really do need to stand out and be noticed. You cannot be a shy wall flower. You MUST stand out. You MUST think carefully and be bold. You have to stand out.

The analogy to think about is to think about rush hour. We have all been at a main city train station or tube station, for example, and seen the volumes of people piling off a train that has just arrived. It is hard to pick anyone in particular out in that mass of people, who are all pretty much dressed the same, in the current work or fashion and colours - and this sea of similarity comes charging towards you. You tend to just see a mass of people, and not notice anyone in particular. If you do, it tends to be the odd person that is dressed differently, very tall or has something that makes them "pop" and so stands out in the mass of sameness. Eventually if you waiting for someone, you may pick them out.Though usually they see you first and draw your attention (something a brand cannot do!).


I encourage you to think of your challenge as you think about your brand, and how to be noticed, is how can you make it stand out in a similar volume of news like a mass of people pouring off a train at rush hour. Imagine your message has to stand out in this vast crowd of similarly dressed and looking messages and product promises. You need to be able to be noticed and stand out in that sea of grey and similarity.  The reality is that often in marketing we tend to feel most comfortable sticking with the trends, what the competition are doing. What has worked in the past. We start with a mindset of the category norms, the familiar codes and looks - and find it hard to break or change them.

The reality is that to really stand out, you need to be different. Different enough to be noticed. But not different enough to not be appealing. A tough balance. But it has to be done. Especially when the other scary statistic is that up to 90% of new launches fail or fall well below expectations.


Differentiation is key if you want to succeed. You cannot succeed by being the same as others. You have to stand out in a crowd, but you have to still be appealing and relevant and desirable. It takes skill and creativity. So to increase your chance of success and avoiding pretty much everything you work on failing, as with 90% of new products failing means you could do, you need to think about standing out in rush hour.

I did a talk on the importance of being different at a Marketing Forum event which may also help, and this is a PDF of that talk: What makes you different?