Stand Up And Be Counted.

Wearing pink shirts to express solidarity with a bullied schoolmate was the way these students encouraged people to stand up and be counted. You either wore pink or you didn't - there was no choice. As Seth Godin's outstanding post explains, the key is to make sure you don't allow your users to choose the indifference option.

Just as the don't know/average answer in a research question is the kiss of death, so too is resembling your competition. You have two choices.

1) Stand out by being functionally better than them - something which I contend, as my regular reader knows, is not as hard as you might think.

2) Accept that you've allowed yourself to drift into the commodified zone and that the best way out is to stand for something so that customers (otherwise inured to any functional excellence you may claim) will think of you as like-minded people and want to do business with you.