1、avo id t h e inside the buyers brainparity trapdifferentiating your solutions in highly competitive categoriesc o s t lysignalsConsider the peacock.You might think a peacock would struggle to elude predators due to its huge,cumbersome tail and brightly colored plumage.Yet peacocks do indeed thrive i

2、n the wildbefuddling Charles Darwin enough for him to declare,Doug HuttonSVP Products,B2B DecisionLabsIt wasnt until 100 years later(too late for Darwin)that Amotz Zahavi,a biologist at Tel Aviv University,coined the term“costly signaling”to explain the conundrum.Costly signaling is a theory that po

3、sits that expensive-seeming signals or actions are harder to fake,and thus perceived as more believable.The peacocks tail serves as a“costly signal”to potential mates that its strong enough to survive,despite its big and bright tail.Less fit specimens wouldnt have the agility to avoid predators if a

4、 long tail handicapped them.In a business context,you can use costly signals in your messaging to assign more value and credibility to your solution.When youre competing in a crowded category with many other solutions that look and sound like yours,you need to“signal”through your messages and conver

5、sations why your solution is better and different from your competitors.But how?How can you position your solution in a way that signals to buyers that your claims are honest and persuades them to choose you?To find out,B2B DecisionLabs partnered with Dr.Nick Lee,behavioral scientist and Professor o

6、f Marketing at Warwick Business School,to study the best way to make your solution stand out in highly competitive categories.The premise was simple:What if you took the same feature set from the same company and told the story in a different way?Can one version of the story consistently and materia