The commodity trap
The gravity in business markets that pulls every offer towards sameness. AI has made it stronger by stripping the scarcity out of capability.
Every business market has a gravity that pulls offers towards sameness. Features get matched, service levels converge, and the conversation drifts towards price because price is the one thing everyone can compare. That is the commodity trap, and AI has powered it up, because capability that used to be scarce, the analysis and the drafting and the research, is now available to your competitor at the same price it is available to you.
Two escapes are in the book. SKF stopped selling bearings and sold uptime and yield. BASF stopped selling paint and sold the total cost of a painted car body. In both cases the supplier moved its offer from the outer ring of the three rings, the product, to the middle ring, the value received. Sell the outer ring and you invite a conversation about price. Sell the middle ring and you invite a conversation about the customer’s business, which only you have been in the room for.
Set out in full in: Creating Customer Value Propositions with AI (Kogan Page, 2027), chapter 3.
Related terms
The three rings
The customer's future state at the centre, the value they receive around it, your products in the outer ring. Customers buy the centre; suppliers sell the outside.
Better before cheaper
Raynor and Ahmed's first rule of exceptional companies. The value proposition is the instrument for competing on better.
High-impact value proposition
Speaks to a problem the customer actually has, is specific enough to be hard to copy, and carries proof.
Causal ambiguity
Advantage that even the company holding it cannot fully explain. AI copies the explicit and cannot copy the ambiguous, so this is where advantage now lives.
See the method run on one real account in three days: the One Page Proposition.