The most powerful innovation strategy is reverse benchmarking: find the metric that every competitor has neglected and double down on it, because taking something bad about the category and making it spectacular creates disproportionate value and rewires the customer's utility function.

I'll give you an example of this. So I call this reverse benchmarking. In other words, you look at all the metrics that everybody cares about in the category. You find a metric that's been completely and ridiculously neglected and you double down on that thing. Now I first came across this in Will Guidara's fantastic book, Unreasonable Hospitality. He goes to the number one restaurant in the world. All of his team say, 'We ought to copy this. We ought to do that thing with the napkins. I really like what they do in the bathrooms with the scented jawsticks. Let's copy that.' And Guidara goes, 'Not going to copy any of that.' Because two, one, we can't afford to. And two, they're already doing it. What I want to know from you is what out of this evening at the world's best restaurant, a Michelangar restaurant somewhere. What was a bit disappointing? What was a bit me? And they said the coffee was a bit average, you know, it was nothing special. and the beer drinkers, probably the chefs who'd gone along, got treated really crappily, shabily compared to the wine drinkers. So he goes back to his own restaurant and he appoints a coffee sommelier and a beer sommelier. And he says, 'Your job is not just to benchmark against these people, it's to hit it out of the park.' Now, if you think about it, taking something that's bad about the category, not not saying we need to raise our level to the category average, but instead doing it spectacularly well, something that nobody's expecting. That was what Apple did, I would argue. Okay. That's what Bies did. I don't know if you're Bies. Where where are you in the US? It basically started with an insight around women's restrooms. Now, you could have just had averely clean women's restrooms and you would have benchmarked. No, no, no. They're like the bloody hall of mirrors at Versailles, right? I mean, I haven't been in them, but the men's restrooms are pretty good, but the women's ones are apparently sensational. And my argument is that, you know, if you, let's say you're a hotel, okay, everybody will focus on the rack rate and the this and the size of the room and, you know, so on and so forth. Have you ever had a even in a really expensive hotel, a laundry experience that isn't a bit of a pain in the ass? You know, you got to fill in a form, you got to put it in a bag. By the way, if you get your laundry back, they never replace the bag the second day. So, if you want a second lot of laundry, you've got to ring up and ask for another bag and another form. Okay? Now what would happen if a hotel if I stayed in a hotel which was I'm not saying you could be totally [ __ ] okay as a hotel as long as you have a brilliant laundry service you know Apple is you know on a par technologically with other entities but it's sensationally good at the emotional component you know bies is what it's a thing apart you know Uber doesn't have cabs that smell of urine I'm not suggesting you can neglect the other stuff but I think what you can do is that when you cause the customer to pay attention to something, it consequently becomes more important because it's surprising and because it it's attentiongrabbing, it therefore suddenly uh causes the consumer to completely rewe their utility function.

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