Pick a Lane Nobody Owns
The copy trap: same shape, different height
Picture your business and your toughest rival as two lines on a chart of what customers value. If you both compete on the same factors, your lines have the exact same shape — yours just sits a notch higher or lower. Subtract the average and you collapse onto one identical line.
Competing on the same factors means your only real difference is altitude — a little higher, a little lower on the very same curve. That is the copy trap: two lookalikes drifting toward each other until price is the only thing left to cut. A strong strategy has a curve that is a different SHAPE, not just a different height.
- List the 5–8 factors everyone in your industry competes on and spends money on.
- Rate the level customers get on each factor, high to low, for you and your main rival.
- Connect the dots into two curves and lay them on top of each other.
- If the shapes match, you're in the copy trap. Redraw a target curve that deliberately dips low on some factors and spikes high on others.
Among ~1,600 lookalike wines fighting on prestige, oak, ageing and complex tasting notes, Casella drew a deliberately different curve: it stripped the jargon, offered just two easy, fruity, sweet wines in identical bottles, and made the whole thing fun and unintimidating.
→ [yellow tail] became the fastest-growing wine brand in US and Australian history, mostly without advertising, by pulling in beer and cocktail drinkers who never bought wine.
By clinging to the cheap end, hit by a strong Australian dollar and heavy debt, Casella posted major losses around 2013 and had to restructure. The brand that created the ocean got stuck at the bottom of it.
You cannot see convergence in a spreadsheet — budgets hide it. You see it the instant you DRAW the curves side by side. Owners who only ever budget their strategy never notice they've become a slightly cheaper copy.
Difference in height is a discount waiting to happen. Difference in shape is a strategy. Draw the picture, then break the shape.
On one sheet, plot your value curve against your nearest rival's. Circle every factor where the two lines nearly touch — that overlap is where you're being copied, and where you must diverge.
Pick a Lane Nobody Owns