What makes this different?

What makes me care? What connects me to it? What keeps me engaged with it after I’ve purchased it? I’ve spent most of my career watching businesses search for the thing that makes them different… or trying to build something different. Sometimes it was obvious. A better product… a new technology… a distribution advantage… a feature nobody else had… a business model competitors hadn’t figured out yet. In the earliest days of the internet, simply understanding digital before everybody else became an advantage (especially after the dot com bubble busted). I watched companies build entire businesses around capabilities that their competitors either couldn’t replicate… or couldn’t replicate quickly enough.

The “quickly” part is starting to change.

Historically, competitive advantage has always had a relationship with time. It wasn’t enough to build something better… the real magic happened when you could remain better for long enough to matter… or iterate quick enough. I’m starting to wonder how much time businesses have left. Think about what happens now when a company launches something genuinely interesting. Technology is accessible… features get copied… business models get reverse-engineered… and whatever works spreads.

Something remarkable becomes something expected… remarkably fast.

Which raises a fairly strategic question most founders grapple with: What happens when the thing that makes you different is no longer very difficult to copy? This week on Thinking With Mitch Joel, I sat down with Lifang He. Lifang spent more than two decades working on brand strategy, product marketing and go-to-market for companies like Apple, Amazon and Ring, and she’s the author of Brand Power Built In. We were talking about technology companies and the increasingly difficult task of differentiating products when their capabilities start looking remarkably similar. Her argument is that this is precisely when brand becomes more important… I’ll happily co-sign on that and push it even further… because “brand” can sound like the marketing layer we wrap around a product after the important work has been done. But what if competitive advantage is increasingly moving away from what a company makes… and toward the relationship people have with the company that makes it?

Said another way: If everybody can eventually copy the feature… what can’t they copy?

What becomes much harder to copy is what people believe about you. The trust that was earned… the taste that is demonstrated… the consistency of decisions that align with the customer’s values… the way a brand behaves when things go wrong (and they always go wrong)… the feelings customers have when they interact with you… the promises you refuse to break when breaking them would be more profitable… which has me wondering if competitive advantage is not something businesses have… maybe it’s something businesses earn.

And earning takes time… which creates a strange paradox…

Technology is making it possible to replicate more of what companies do… faster than ever. But the things that become more valuable in that environment may be the things that stubbornly refuse to accelerate… reputation… trust… taste… relationships… consistency…

Have you seen anyone vibe code their way using agents into any of those?

Lifang makes the point that the product experience itself is one of the most powerful ways a company builds its brand. So was the distinction between product and brand artificial all along? Customers don’t experience them separately… every interaction becomes another tiny piece of evidence about whether you are worth choosing again.

Is this a form of marketing inversion that we’re seeing?

For decades, companies built the technology first… got the functionality right… created the distribution… protected the intellectual property. Then they worried about brand… trust… experience… community… meaning and everything else that was difficult to put on a spreadsheet or into production. We called those things “soft” because they were hard to measure… not because they were easy to build. Now, those “soft” things may be becoming the hardest competitive advantages of all.

In a world where increasingly capable businesses can build increasingly similar things… being difficult to copy may have less to do with what you make… and much more to do with who you are.

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