By Federico Soto Roland – Strategy, AI & Digital Director, NSB Agency

Everything gets copied too fast. The gadget that was "the future" yesterday is a commodity today. The feature that looked like a differentiator, tomorrow your competitor already has it. And the same goes for ideas: whatever is "new" evaporates within weeks.

In my 2012 book, "Brands, the anxiolytic of the postmodern world," I already saw it coming: any product differentiation (unless it's shielded by a patent) is fleeting. Period. What sets you apart today disappears tomorrow.

And yet we still hear clients say:
—"We're different because our product is superior."
—"Our service is better than anyone else's."

The uncomfortable truth: it's almost never quite like that. Neither is the product all that different, nor is the service the silver bullet. The result? There's no sustainable competitive differentiation… except the kind built from the brand. And that only happens through communication. (Unless you're a monopoly or hold a patent, of course.)

Saliency versus differentiation

At NSB we stopped obsessing over "differentiation" years ago. Today we'd rather talk about saliency.

Differentiation: objective, verifiable, measurable. "What is, is." A product does something the other one can't. It has a lower price. Higher quality. It can be compared.

Saliency: subjective, capricious, built 100% in the consumer's mind through the sheer force of communication. It's about owning a territory, a color, a tone, a character, a gesture. It doesn't need to be "real" to be effective.

Differentiation exists even without communicating it. Saliency, on the other hand, requires repetition, memorability and strategic direction.

Great brands aren't "different" in essence. They're salient because they consistently repeat what makes them visible and memorable.

Why be salient?

Because if you're not, you end up in the swamp of commoditization: the ground where the cheapest and most available player wins. That road leads to crushed margins, brutal competition and brands with no soul.

Being salient takes courage. It means rowing against the current.
When everyone goes ZIG, you have to dare to go ZAG.

But careful: saying it is easy. Doing it, not so much. It means challenging corporate cultures ruled by fear, where mistakes are a sin and creativity is seen as a risk rather than an investment.

And yet the evidence is clear: creativity accounts for more than 50% of a campaign's success, far more than the choice of media. The bigger your budget, the more you should bet on being creative and salient. And if you're a challenger, even more so: you have to hit harder, be more visible, more daring.

How do you pull it off?

First, by breaking with the culture of conformism. If your organization is dominated by fear, no brief or agency can save you (an old saying goes: "a client gets the brand/advertising it deserves.")

Second, by choosing the right partner. One who understands research, who questions, who isn't afraid to tell you what no one else dares to, who pushes past the expected and won't settle for "business as usual."

That's what we do at NSB. We're not trying to be the biggest agency or the fastest-growing one. We want to be the ideal partner for brands that want to challenge the current. The ones that dare to go ZAG, again and again.

Because in markets full of cloned products, saliency isn't an option. It's the only way out.