More of the same never adds up to the best. Walk around the grocery store and you’ll see thousands of brand names trying to make you think they’re the best. They do this by trying to add something on top of their base offering.

Take the cereal isle, which for decades has been trying to find every conceivable way to put corn in a box. The cereal industry has become “hyper-segmented.” There are so many brands trying to be seen as unique, that the differences between them are rarely important. And this isn’t just limited to the cereal isle. Walk around store and you’ll see tons of examples of hyper-segmentation.

What’s interesting about hyper-segmentation is that it’s based more on competition than on the consumer. It happens when businesses are a little too willing to respond to what their competition is doing.

In the early 2000’s, this was taken to its most ridiculous conclusion by the razor blade industry. Razor blade manufactures realized that people liked having more than one blade… if their competitor gave them 2 blades, I’d give them 3, then my competitor would create one with 4. It got out of hand. There are still companies out there today selling razor heads with 7 or more blades on them. When you’re stacking that many blades on a razor head, is it the result of careful forethought or is it a signal of a desperate or scared entrepreneur?

As creators, it’s our job to create something unique. Uniqueness can be hard to define in creativity because there’s a lot of gray area. Instead of adding small details to our products, which will lead to hyper-segmentation, we can instead focus on creating meaningful differences.

The problem with the hyper-segmented markets is that there are so many tiny differences that it overshadows the important ones. This is what Apple does well. They don’t compete like a normal tech company. They are incredibly good at communicating what makes them meaningfully unique as a brand. They don’t try to communicate every tiny detail to us, they focus on what makes them meaningfully different.

So as you create today, pay close attention to what type of uniqueness your creating. Are the differences between you and your competitors meaningfully different, or are they there only because you don’t want to be seen as behind. What makes your creativity so unique should be based on your values, and not simply a response to your competition.