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The Collapse of Distinction: Stand Out and Move Up While Your Competition Fails Hardcover – January 1, 2009

by Scott McKain (Author)

4.2 63 ratings

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Can your customers tell the difference between you and the competition?

It's not that we can't see the forest for the trees, it's just that these days, every tree looks exactly alike. From big box retail to fast food to insurance-no one stands out. Distinction has collapsed into beige uniformity. And in today's tough economic times, this copycat uniformity is resulting in the death of businesses in every industry, says author Scott McKain.

If a business is going to thrive, it has to rise above the fray. In The Collapse of Distinction, McKain will help you understand the reasons behind the current quagmire of stifling sameness, and will give you the tools your company needs to step away from the competition.

Endorsements

"In challenging economic times, this is the one book every business owner MUST read. Collapse of Distinction is further evidence that Scott McKain is the premiere business communicator of our time. Not only has Scott produced extraordinary results in his own businesses by adhering to these principles, but he makes it simple for you to do so as well. By following the easily applied concepts from Collapse of Distinction, you will set the standard of excellence for your industry and make your competition irrelevant." -- Joseph Michelli, PhD, speaker, consultant, and author of The Starbucks Experience, The New Gold Standard, and When Fish Fly

"Differentiation is not an option in business. In a world where the word 'commodity' has become the norm, Scott McKain clarifies the all-important (and all-profitable) strategy to become different, become distinct, and become dominant in your marketplace. Buy this book. Read it. And put it into practice." -- Jeffrey Gitomer, author of The Little Red Book of Selling

"The primary need today is to constantly present ourselves as different from-and better than-those we compete with! Scott McKain's latest book, Collapse of Distinction, is a must-read for any professional or organization attempting to creatively differentiate from the competition. I predict this book will be a massive hit!" -- Don Hutson, co-author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The One Minute Entrepreneur, and CEO of U. S. Learning

"In these uncertain economic times, we need new and refreshing ideas about how to move forward. Scott McKain's Collapse of Distinction may just save our sanity and common sense with his positive approach to business and life itself." -- Joe Bonsall, thirty-five year member of legendary music group, The Oak Ridge Boys, and author of the best-selling book G.I. Joe and Lillie

"I could not stop reading.making notes.writing our staff and our suppliers.about the ideas I've learned! (And this was just by the end of Chapter One!) With superb style, storytelling, and rationale, Collapse of Distinction is a distinctive piece of business and personal literature." --Ty Boyd, Founder and Chairman, Executive Learning Systems

"If I can't tell the difference between you and your competitor, why should I spend my money with you? The answer to that question is the key to your survival and success. Scott McKain's new book teaches how to answer that question-the right way!" --Larry Winget, television personality and New York Times best-selling author of People Are Idiots and I Can Prove It

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Scott McKain formerly served as Vice Chairman of a dynamic holding company that was named one of the "fastest growing companies" in America. He is also the Co-founder and Principal of The Value Added Institute, a think-tank that examines the role of the customer experience in creating significant advances in the level of client loyalty. He has been honored with induction into the "Professional Speakers Hall of Fame" -- and is a member of the "Speakers Roundtable," an elite group of twenty business speakers considered by many to be among the best in the world. His client list for speeches, seminars and consulting is a "Who's Who" of corporations (such as GE, IBM, Phillips, and hundreds more). He has appeared on platforms in all fifty states of the US and fourteen countries. Scott also makes appearances on FOX News Channel and other major media outlets as an expert commentator. Scott, his wife, Tammy, and sons Corbin and Faron Byler live in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Thomas Nelson Inc; Nelsonfree ed. edition (January 1, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 250 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1595551859
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1595551856
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.75 x 1 x 8.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,451,606 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #337 in Industrial Management & Leadership
- #14,528 in Leadership & Motivation

Customer Reviews:
4.2 63 ratings

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Scott McKain
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Scott McKain is the author of a book named by thirty major newspapers as one of the “ten best business books” of the year. His lasted book, "ICONIC," was named by Forbes.com as one of the "ten best business books of the year," as well.
McKain is a globally respected authority on how to serve customers more remarkably -- and sell products and services more uniquely.
• By the time McKain was 21, he had met with the President of the United States in the Oval Office and the Chairman of GM in Detroit. This experience fostered a fascination with leadership and management that continues to this day.
• He played the villain in a film named by esteemed critic, Roger Ebert, as one of the 50 “great movies” in the history of the cinema.
• He has been quoted in the New York Times and Wall St. Journal, has been featured in USA Today and has appeared multiple times on FOX News Channel
• He is the author of three Amazon.com #1 business bestsellers.
• He has been honored with induction into the “Professional Speakers Hall of Fame.”
• He is one of only 24 members of the “Sales and Marketing Hall of Fame.” (including Dale Carnegie, Zig Ziglar, and Seth Godin.)
• He has appeared on platforms in all 50 states and 17 countries...from Mexico to Morocco...from Singapore to Sweden...from the White House with the President in the audience...to your next event.
See more on the author's page
Scott McKain
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4.2 out of 5

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Roland Hesz

A must read

Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2009

Verified Purchase

Do you have to compete on price?
Do you need "added value"?
Do you have to make business with everyone?
Do you have to be just like everyone?
Is imitating your competitors a must?

According to Scott McKain, the answer is no.

Clarity, Creativity, Communication and Customer-Experience Focus are the four cornerstones you can build your business upon.

Defining clearly who you are and who you are not, who your customers are and who are not helps you to be different.
Does it mean you have to send away prospective clients? Yes.
Does it mean your market share becomes limited? Yes.
Is that a bad thing? Ask Apple.

Seriously, you should read the book.

3 people found this helpful

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OKindle

Not new

Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2020

Verified Purchase

Thank you for asking.. The product was categorized as new, however had dirty spots on the book cover, I had to wipe them off and luckily they came off. The book inside looks okay.

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E. Brown

Are You Distinct From Your Competitors?

Reviewed in the United States on August 24, 2011

It has taken me a while to write this review. Not from lack of reading time, I assure you, I often have 2-3 books going at once. Scott McKain's book, The Collapse Of Distinction: Stand Out and Move Up While Your Competition Fails, is not a book you skim through. I found myself taking it a bite-at-a-time. I often paused to reflect on and look for ways to apply the action steps outlined in the book. I have many pages dog-eared and chunks of the content underlined.

Some of the questions early in the book that bear reflection are:
- How can your customers distinguish you from your competition?
- Do you bring a higher value to customers?
- Besides product and price, what do you really sell?
- Why would your customer pay for you over your competition?

If you are new to brand development or in the process of reviving your brand, answering these initial questions may be all you need in order to set yourself head and shoulders above your competitors. Yet, you would be doing yourself a disservice if you did not process the remainder of McKain's material.

Understanding The 3 Destroyers

According to the author, there are 3 destroyers of distinction:
1) Incremental Advances - emulation; replicating small advances your competitors make.
2) New Competitors - new challenges; trying to be like competitors and not staying on top of the competitive landscape.
3) Familiarity Breeds Complacency - customer boredom; being so familiar you are taken for granted.

Think about it - what have you changed in the last year about yourself or your organization to freshen the approach with your customers and constituents?

Don't Be Different - Be Distinct!

McKain goes on to define what he calls "The Ebert Effect" named after movie critic, Roger Ebert.
When people, from their perspective, are inundated with indistinguishable choices, they perceive a product, service, approach, or experience with a specific point of differentiation to be superior.

This means creating small strategies that are recognizable as different from your competition. This is only one step to being different in the customers eyes. We are encouraged to move toward being distinct. The only way to do this, says McKain, is to create a foundation of distinction built on the following four pillars:

1) Clarity - Who are you? Be specific about what your organization is and is not.
2) Creativity - McKain says, "Creativity without clarity is devoid of distinction." What creative strategies are you employing to enhance the quality of customer contacts?
3) Communication - Know the benefits of compelling story telling. Tweak your distinct communication for your audiences.
4) Customer Experience Focus - Create a unique customer centric experience that cements loyalty.

Each of the pillars works with the next. You cannot have one without the others if you wish to truly be distinct.

Final Thoughts

The book was more than a business book, it was a work book. It is laid out for those people who have the time to consume the book page by page. It also has executive summaries at the end of each chapter followed by action steps to put the material into practice - which I would highly recommend.

The publisher, Thomas Nelson, also added a unique feature. Published as a "Nelson Free" title allows the buyer access to three formats for the price of one! I got the hardback version and that gave me access to both an ebook and an audio version of the book. At this writing, it looks as though Thomas Nelson has continued this practice with only a small handful of their titles. A nice perk but not a must-have for many readers.

Nevertheless, if you are wanting to improve your brand distinction, The Collapse Of Distinction, is definitely worth the read. It is full of practical tips throughout and resources at the back of the book that can help you dig further into differentiating your company from the myriad of others vying for consumer attention.

Helpful

Matt Davidson

How Does the Small Business Owner Survive in the Obama Economy?

Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2013

Verified Purchase

The 100 million people who are losing wealth to be redistributed by the Federal Govern so 50 million can have health insurance are going to be holding on to their purse strings and wallets tighter than ever. What is a small business to do? In this marketplace you better create value and by being a company of distinction in one of the few ways you can do it. Every small business owner need to keep Scott McKain and his books in mind. This is his second most recent, "Create Distinction" came out this year and it is equally imperative that business owners who want to grow in this economy read it as well.

Reviewed in the United States on July 6, 2014

Quick simple read

Good, but not great, marketing book

Reviewed in the United States on June 5, 2009

I've been pondering writing this review for six weeks or more but only just decided what I really wanted to say. The book is a good book. Make no mistake about that. You may learn something new from it...or, at least, gain a new perspective for your marketing endeavors.

A good book, but not a great book in my opinion.

However, I think it could have been a great book if it had been shorter and better focused. And if the author (or publisher) had not added so much fluff to stretch it out, particularly the "Executive Summary" at the end of every chapter. Those summaries serve little real purpose other than to add pages. The main text of each chapter is already well-organized with plenty of subheadings and pull quotes and, thus, is easy to scan to find what you want. The "Action Steps, Questions, and Ideas" add-on at the end of each chapter is a little better and more useful but doesn't really add much value (again, it mostly adds pages).

I absolutely agree with McKain that our society in general, and marketing of businesses in particular, has degenerated into an overall sameness with very little to differentiate one from another. The exceptions serve to prove the truth of the observations. In the first third of the book, McKain does an excellent job of answering the question "how did we get into this mess?" He addresses the various self-destructive decisions that business all too often make in an attempt to meet the competition rather than provide something unique and valuable to the customer.

McKain then sets out to offer concrete steps you can take to differentiate your business and its products or services from the overwhelming sameness in your marketplace. At that point, his advice seems to sound too much like the advice your can find in dozens (maybe hundreds) of other business books. The terminology may be different but the basics are the same. His "Four Cornerstones of Distinction" -- clarity, creativity, communication, and customer-experience focus -- are neither unique nor insightful, in my opinion. Some of the discussion of these four concepts is very good, but much reads like the text was padded for extra length.

And I did grow weary of the continual references to how wonderful the Obama presidential campaign was. McKain professes to believe that substance matters, but these kinds of examples seem to contradict that stand. A campaign, no matter now successful, that was almost all style with very little meaningful substance does not seem like a great example. Besides, if he wanted political examples, there have been some excellent conservative campaigns from which to draw. A little balance would have been nice. As it is, by about the third Obama campaign example, I began to skim the book. But maybe that's just me.

I agree with McKain's basic thesis: "Over the past several years, we have seen the homogenization of practically everything." And his analysis of how it came about is fantastic. I found myself nodding in agreement as I read. His recipe for successfully differentiating your business from your competition is good and, if you haven't read many other similar business books, you will find it useful.

This good 250-page book would have been a great 150-page book with more variety in its examples of successful differentiation. And the result probably would have been a harder hitting, more tightly focused, more valuable book as a result.

One other note of interest about this book: it's a NelsonFree title, meaning that any reader with the book in hand can go to a Thomas Nelson (the publisher) website and download the book in several other formats -- including PRC (compatible with the Amazon Kindle and Mobipocket), PDF, and EPUB (compatible with Sony Reader) as well as MP3 audio files (the book is split into 12 files). I downloaded all of them. Here's my take on them:

* PRC (Kindle/Mobipocket) -- looks great on my Kindle and the desktop Mobipocket Reader
* PDF -- looks just like the print edition (imagine that), complete with the blank pages...but the ToC had no hyperlinks to the chapters (why not?)
* EPUB -- I don't have a Sony Reader, so I first tried using the Adobe Digital Editions reader, but the file would not open (just a generic error message). Then I tried using the desktop version of Stanza, and that worked fine.
* MP3 -- these worked fine, but I have two issues with them: (1) no indication of who is reading it (McKain or somebody else?) and (2) the files are huge with 26.5 Mb for the short Introduction (it's just voice, guys, and could have been compressed a lot without losing significant audio quality)

One thing does puzzle me. Since the publisher obviously has a Kindle edition of the book (see the previous paragraph), why aren't they offering it for sale on the Amazon Kindle Store right now? They also already have an audiobook version, but that is not available on Amazon, either. And the EPUB version is not available on the Sony Ebookstore site. This smacks of archaic thinking (which seems to contradict Thomas Nelson's innovative approach with the NelsonFree concept) -- first the hardcover, then the paperback, then the Kindle, then the audiobook?

I'd recommend this book if you could get a Kindle or paperback edition for, say, $9.95 (although I think Kindle books should be several dollars less than that). I think $24.95 for the hardcover is too much for what you get. The current Amazon discounted price of $16.49 is a good price when you couple it with the free alternate editions.

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C. Hermans

"Stand out from the crowd" - implement these simple ideas

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 10, 2010

Verified Purchase

"The Collapse of Distinction: Overcoming the Stifling Sameness of Today's Marketplace " is all about: don't try to add incremental differences between you and your competitor - it is a waste of money, effort and time.

Scott McKain starts his excellent book by remembering his childhood in a little town in the US where two local diners suddenly experienced the "fast-food" chains. One business didn't take long to fold, the other survived as if the fast-food giants weren't even there.

Collapse of Distinction contains many more examples and steps to take yourself to "Stand out from the crowd" - beginning with the three dangers every business faces when competing:

1. incremental differences,
2. new competition and
3. familiarity does not bread contempt it breads complacency

Scott answers these dangers with 4 pieces of advice you should implement in that order:

* Clarity,
* Creativity,
* Communication and
* Customer Service

It is a great read - the only thing I did not like is Scott's dislike of the IMHO greatest book of all: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't , but then I'm biased on this subject. I can't see the difference between Scot's "Clarity" advice and Jim's "Hedge Hog Concept" advice. But I leave that for you to decide for yourselves.

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