Jersey Mike’s is a sandwich chain that claims it has a special sauce. You can get your sandwich made “Mike’s way”, which means you get “Mike’s sauce” on your sandwich. Walk into Jersey Mike’s and there’s lots of stuff celebrating this special condiment. You would think that Mike’s sauce must be some well-guarded secret — something mysterious and precious like the original Coca-Cola formula.
No. Mike’s sauce is basically just oil and vinegar, which is an ingredient available at any sandwich joint. Walk into a Subway or Quizno’s or whatever similar sandwich shop you have in your town, and you can basically get Mike’s Sauce just by asking for oil and vinegar.
Still, people in our house love Jersey Mike’s. When they order, my wife and son are eager to affirm, “Yes, we want it Mike’s Way.” They say that it is the sauce that makes it good.
What’s going on inside the Jersey Mike’s corporate office?
Imagine an executive at Subway walking in to work one day and saying, “You know, we should really bet the farm on salt. Let’s put salt at the center of all our branding. People will get to choose whether they order their sandwich with our signature salt on it — we’ll call it the Salt Way.”
Others in the room would probably wonder if he was smoking salts. He’d be laughed out of the room or worse. Eventually, once they caught their breath, the other Subway executives would state the obvious: “Every sandwich shop has salt. That’s not a differentiator!”
They’d be right, but also wrong because strategic differentiation isn’t only about what competitors can’t do. It’s also about what they won’t do.
No one from Subway — the stodgy old grown up in the sandwich shop business — is going to take a risk like that. They’re much more likely to appeal to truly generic claims like “freshness”, which for whatever reason passes as a safer claim. In fact, such claims are actually riskier because they are even more generic and easily claimed by competitors, but they feel less risky because they’re less specific.
Someone inside Jersey Mike’s must have said, “But what if someone doesn’t like oil and vinegar? Aren’t we going to drive them away?” No, because you don’t have to get your sandwich Mike’s Way. You can get it without Mike’s Sauce.
Somehow, Jersey Mike’s was able to overcome these objections — probably because they were small enough and young enough at the time that the risk didn’t feel like much of a risk.
The same thing plays out in museums. A strategy is about taking a position and making a promise. We will be the best place for people in this area to visit when they want to achieve x outcome. That outcome could be social or personal or any number of what may on some level feel like generic outcomes that any museum could provide. Feeling relaxed and calm or thinking about things in a new perspective, for example, are things that any and most museums do. These outcomes are to museums what ingredients like salt, pickles, mayonnaise, oil and vinegar are to sandwich shops. You can find them at any museum, but few museums intentionally choose which ones they’ll focus on. In choosing, the institution makes a promise and creates for itself a focal point.
In a world where the incumbents and alternatives never intentionally choose what kind of value they want to provide, the decision to decide itself becomes a differentiator.