 Gildan Media presents Your Coach in a Box, affordable life-changing audio programs. In search of the obvious, the antidote for today's marketing mess by Jack Trout, narrated by Sean Pratt, Preface. Business is in an era of killer competition, and at a time when the function of marketing is of critical importance, marketing is in a mess. I didn't appreciate how bad things had become until I came across some research as I was updating my book, Differentiate or Die. In great detail, this study illustrated that while categories are expanding thanks to the immutable law of division, something sinister is happening. Despite all the attention paid to branding these days, more and more of these categories are sliding into commoditization. In other words, fewer and fewer of the brands in these categories are well differentiated. And people's mind, they are there but that's about all. You could call them placeholders. They are sort of like squatters. They live there but don't own a meaningful idea that makes them unique. Differentiation of course exists and does so on the basis of a product or service actually owning values, real or perceived, rational or emotional, and occupying a real place in the consumer's minds, beyond the consumer just being aware of them. And the degree to which they possess these values and have meaning in the consumer's lives determines whether they have differentiated themselves. But fewer and fewer products and services are able to demonstrate any degree of actual differentiation. To prove this, Brand Keys Incorporated, a New York based loyalty and engagement research consultancy, conducted an analysis of 1,847 products and services in 75 categories via their Customer Loyalty Engagement Index. Using a combination of psychological inquiry and factor regression and causal path analysis, they are able to predict how positively or negatively consumers will act toward the products depending on their degree of differentiation. On average, the study found that only 21% of all the products and services examined had any points of differentiation. Sample complete. Ready to continue?