Youngme Moon has written a remarkable book called Different: Escaping The Competitive Herd. Moon, a marketing professor at Harvard, deconstructs the business of marketing and exposes something that is not a surprise — marketing has become predictable, interchangeable and un-creative.

Of course, that’s a broad generalization, but one that she aptly demonstrates to be true. At the same time, it provides Moon with a platform to showcase what she calls “reverse brands” or “oxymoron brands,” which are often the most successful in their categories by going out of their way to be different from the herd and single-minded in their approach. As she says, marketing is supposed to be about creating meaningful differences, and yet most brands bludgeon us with a proliferation of sameness.

Moon makes her point easily. Walk down the center aisles of any grocery store and scan the cereal, toothpaste, dog food, or beverage section, pretending you just landed on this planet, trying to figure out what’s different about each product. She calls it “heterogeneous homogeneity.” How about running shoes, cars, or large screen TV’s?

To paraphrase Youngme Moon, the category becomes a blur, there is a disconnect between the specific attributes and benefits of any brand. In essence, you can’t see the trees for the forest. This is the herd instinct. As marketers have gathered more and more data on customer preferences, they added attributes to their brands.

Of course, as one brand adds new features, every brand in the category is then compelled to keep up to prevent share-loss. Low-calorie, high-fiber, low-fat, high in daily requirements, low-cholesterol, low-sodium, high-energy, driver’s side airbags, front-side passenger airbags, front and rear airbags, cushioned ride, natural, organic, whitening, minty, pillow top, pillow top with airbags?

How ironic. Marketing has become a victim of too much information. Technology has made it easy to collect data on every customer segment and dissect preferences by segment, which has bred a process Moon calls “hypersegmentation.”

Every brand scours its data to identify what is thought to be a hidden opportunity of customer desire and then rushes out a new Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) or whole new line of SKUs to fulfill those customer needs. In the packaged goods section, it has become so hyper that retailers now spend a good deal of their time on SKU rationalization — the process of weeding out the duplicative and slow-turning SKUs that appeal to such a narrow segment of the customer base that they hardly turn over any volume during the course of a year.

One could argue that the recession did the same thing for the automobile industry — did anyone buy a Buick or Oldsmobile in the last 10 years?

Of course, as Moon goes on to say, given that the objective of marketing is to create meaningful differences, there should be nothing wrong. In fact, there should be everything right about identifying customer wants and needs and fulfilling them. Nearly every hotel chain and airline has to offer comparable comfort and convenience services, or they will undoubtedly lose share.

How can the Four Seasons not provide pillow-top bedding if Ritz does? How can American Airlines compete if they don’t offer the same amenities as Delta and United? So, what’s the problem? Marketing has become more like engineering and operations than design, passion and creativity. Brands have gone on a mission to add every feature possible, which has resulted in category and brand mediocrity, and overall marketing mediocrity.

Moon describes it as the “artful packaging of meaningless distinction.” One could argue that marketing operates more like political spin than creative thinking. It is change itself that has become a commodity rather than a difference that sets a brand apart. And yet ...

How do brands that go in the opposite direction by providing fewer amenities, fewer services, fewer product features become so distinctive and successful? What are their similarities — or are they all so unique their strategy can’t be duplicated?

What is both unique and similar about each of these single-minded “reverse brands?” One of the things that she discovered is that “there is a kind of difference that says nothing, and there is a kind of difference that speaks volumes.” As Moon writes, for difference to work — to resonate — it’s got to deviate and it’s got to be charismatic.

Google is a prototype of a “reverse-positioned brand.” It deliberately reduced the number of features it offered, while its competitors were adding features by the fistful. Google decided that while users thought they wanted more features, what they really wanted (and maybe didn’t realize it) was a simpler, easier home page for searching and browsing. While every other portal was a cacophony of visual stimulation, Google showed up almost naked.

Other than the founders and investors who created JetBlue, who would have thought that taking away creature comforts and amenities and instructing the passengers to clean up their garbage themselves was a good idea? No preferred seating, no food, no round-trip discounts, plus clean-up duties.

Is it all about technology innovation, or is it all about attitude, design, and intuition? Isn’t the Mini Cooper the VW Beetle with a makeover? Everything about the Mini design and marketing was “yeah, it’s small and it’s great — wanna make something of it?” The Mini created a brand attitude of rebelliousness with style, as the Beetle did 30 years earlier; it was the same rebelliousness with a different kind of style.

Moon’s view is that we have too much data to measure, and we measure it all the time: “If we only pay attention to things that we can measure, we will only pay attention to the things that are easily measurable. And, in the process, we will miss a lot.” She goes on to say that one of the characteristics of all the “reverse brands” is that they are intensely human with elements tied to the human spirit.

The marketers are supposed to be the spirit of the individual. If most companies are focused on engineering, technology, and data, then they are missing out on the nuance of behavior. She brings back a great quote from John Naisbitt, the noted author of Megatrends: “ ... intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data.”

It was intuition that made great creative gods in the heyday of advertising like Ogilvy, Bernbach, Wells, Riney and Chiat. These people didn’t ignore research and data — in fact, they devoured it. But they had the intuition to understand how to connect the dots between the research and real people.

Is it a coincidence that the process of advertising-driven creativity is no longer an important hub of marketing? That process encouraged intuition-driven creativity that is no longer occurring anywhere in marketing. It has been replaced by one-to-one offers that merely reflect what is bought and not what motivates the buyer.

In each case, the “reverse brands” have an attitude that’s very distinct. It’s a conceptual attitude — these brands view their customers and their markets differently. They come at their customers with a different set of promises and with an almost in-your-face statement that they don’t offer everything you’re used to getting.

These brands are an acquired taste of sophistication and simplicity, and the brands make no apologies about what they do or don’t do. What they offer is a difference with distinction that seems to resonate and sustain itself through many brand iterations.

And lest you think these reverse, rebellious brands are mostly technology geared or entrepreneurial in scope, there was once a small chain of rural discount stores that had an attitude about how to sell everything from paper towels to jeans and just about put every department store out of business.