If benchmarking the strengths of your competitors creates a sea of sameness, the antidote is to benchmark their apathy.

Ogilvy's Rory Sutherland calls this "reverse benchmarking." Instead of looking at what the category leader does brilliantly and trying to produce a (what usually becomes a slightly worse) copy of it, you look at what they do weirdly badly - or ignore entirely - and you double down on that.

A famous example of this comes from Will Guidara, the former co-owner of Eleven Madison Park in New York.

In 2010, Eleven Madison Park was ranked #50 on the World's 50 Best Restaurants list. Guidara wanted to be #1. So he took a group of his employees to dine at the restaurant that actually held the number one spot at the time.

The experience was, unsurprisingly, flawless. His team immediately started pointing out all the incredible things the #1 restaurant did well, suggesting they copy them. Guidara stopped them. He wasn't interested in copying their strengths. He asked a different question:

"What features of the experience were disappointing?"

They identified two things. First, the coffee was just okay - standard drip or decaf, nothing special. Second, the diners who preferred beer over wine were treated like second-class citizens by the sommeliers.

Guidara didn't go back and try to out-cook the #1 restaurant. He went back and appointed a coffee sommelier (introducing tableside brewing) and a beer sommelier (curating a menu of artisan beers with specific food pairings).

This. Was. Exceptional.

He found the neglected segments - the touchpoints the category leader was too busy to care about - and he rolled out the red carpet for them. Seven years later, Eleven Madison Park was named the #1 restaurant in the world.

The insight here is profound: Don't benchmark the strengths.

Benchmark the apathy.

There is a hard psychological reality behind why this works, and it's called the Von Restorff effect (or the isolation effect).

Discovered by German psychiatrist Hedwig von Restorff in 1933, the principle proves that when multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is the only one we remember. Human brains are literally wired to filter out the expected and index entirely on the anomaly.

When every SaaS company sends the exact same five-part automated welcome sequence, the buyer's brain filters it out as noise. It doesn’t register.

It doesn't matter if your copy is slightly punchier than your competitor's; the format itself is invisible.

The B2B Institute at LinkedIn recently ran a logo-blind colour test on five major cloud brands (IBM, Dell, Microsoft Azure, Digital Ocean, and Qumulo). They found that only 5.7% of professionals could correctly attribute the brand colours. Worse, 11% of people who saw a Dell ad thought it was actually an ad for Microsoft.

When you build a beige experience based on industry best practice, your ad dollars and your operational efforts are often just driving a mental advantage for your biggest competitor. Every pen Biro, every tissue is a Kleenex and so on, unless their is clear distinction in the product or marketing experience.

As the B2B Institute researchers put it: "Ads that look like your competitor are ads for your competitor."

But when you deploy reverse benchmarking, you weaponise the Von Restorff effect. When a beer drinker in a fine dining restaurant is suddenly handed a curated craft beer menu with a welcoming smile, instead of a condescending look, the expectation violation creates irrational distinction and memorability.

So why don't more marketing teams do this? Because it requires fighting the immense gravitational pull of marketing homogeneity.

It feels incredibly risky to stand up in a leadership meeting and say, "We are not going to optimise our onboard sequence this quarter. Instead, we are going to manually handwrite welcome notes to the mid-tier segment that everyone else ignores."

Nobody gets fired for buying HubSpot and implementing the standard playbook. It's safe. It's defensible. It's what the executive expects to see.

Reverse benchmarking requires you to deliberately under-index on something the industry obsesses over, so you can over-index on something they ignore.

It doesn’t mean absolving yourself of the responsibility to execute on the brilliant basics and expectation.

But it requires identifying the spaces and the weaknesses in your competitor's armour and going all-in on creating truly exceptional moments for your customers, right there.

If you want to escape the beige stack, you need to stop asking how the category leader does things, and start looking for the gaps they've normalised. Here is your Monday Morning Plan.

And a couple of questions to get you thinking as you go into your week:

That’s it for today, if you enjoyed this edition, please forward it to a friend who’s looking to level-up their customer experience game - they’ll love you for it (and I will too) ⏭️ 💌

PS. When you’re ready here’s how I can help you:

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Troy Muir | The Ladder