Who do you get compared to?
Customers don't judge products in isolation. They judge them against alternatives. Value only exists in comparison. What customers compare you to matters far more than the features you offer.
A well-circulated story from the drinks industry illustrates this perfectly. In the early days of non-alcoholic spirits, a new brand secured shelf space in a supermarket chain. The product was put on the shelf with fruit cordials and syrups. It had a big price differential, so unsurprisingly, sales were slow. They were on track to be delisted.
The brand persuaded the supermarket to put them in a different section, one next to the wine. With this new comparison set, the brand went from being an expensive cordial to a healthy spirit, and sales took off.
The product hadn’t changed. The price was the same. But the context was different as the comparison set had changed.
Your comparison set determines three things:
Your price ceiling
The decision criteria customers use
Who you lose to.
If customers see you as interchangeable with competing brands, price becomes the easiest way to choose. And this can be compounded by the fact that pricing is the easiest lever to pull to increase sales. Cue, race to the bottom.
What is a different shelf you could put yourself on? This is a hard question because it typically involves giving up some territory. You can’t be compared differently while still trying to serve everyone. A new shelf requires exclusion.
What if your weigh scales became the health diagnostic tool for beef cattle? This shifting of shelves requires genuine product change, not just economic logic and new messaging.
That would mean the scales are part of a health monitoring system that generates alerts or triggers action (not just data). It integrates into decision moments (treatment, sale timing, grazing moves). The scales are positioned as a risk management investment rather than a hardware purchase. You're no longer competing with other scales. You're competing with the cost of forgone kilos and the personal discomfort of discovering issues too late.
Or the scales could be a beef profit predictor (with associated software) that gives greater certainty over trading and grazing strategies. If your scales change the timing of sale by even one week at the right point in the price curve, they’re not competing with other scales; they’re competing with trading margin.
But making these types of shifts requires the confidence to sacrifice the ‘jack of all trades’ approach to become a master of one.
That's the uncomfortable truth. Everybody wants premium pricing, but nobody wants to give up customers, use cases, or territory.
Narrowing your focus feels risky. But is it riskier than staying on a crowded shelf where every competitor is fighting over the same customers using similar arguments?
The companies that create categories don't start by building better products. They start by deciding who they want to be compared to.
