The Prize of Uniqueness
In yesterday’s post I wrote about uniqueness and how it improves competitive position to the point of essentially becoming a monopoly. By coincidence, on the same day I discovered a very good example of this effect.
In this video, Charlie Rose interviews Spanish chef Ferran Adrià about his philosophy and his restaurant El Bulli near Barcelona. Adrià was recently voted the best chef in the world and is renowned for his highly individual, avant-garde approach to his profession.
One result of this is that El Bulli is perceived as a unique restaurant and, as a consequence, it is extremely difficult to obtain reservations. In 2010, the restaurant will be open for less than six months of the year on an average of only five days per week. Booking for 2010 opened in January, and, as the reservations page points out, seats for the entire year will probably sell out before the month is over. On the same page, the restaurant points out that processing the reservations will be slow, and makes no apology for this fact.
Evidently, Adrià has created a product which delivers such unique value that he can afford luxuries (such as remaining closed for more than half the year) that would be inconceivable for the vast majority of companies. This, I believe, is a very good example of the benefits of uniqueness.
Tags: El Bulli, Ferran Adria
Januar 17th, 2010 at 09:49
Very interesting pair of posts Graham. I agree that uniqueness creates value – often substantial value. I’ve been thinking about this issue recently in terms of craft or scale – you can do one or the other. El Bulli is clearly high craft, there are some other interesting examples of this as well.
Januar 17th, 2010 at 09:51
[...] Dieser Eintrag wurde auf Twitter von Graham Horton, Tim Kastelle erwähnt. Tim Kastelle sagte: Read this, then the previous one that he references RT @Graham_Horton http://bit.ly/8jsy5A and The Prize of Uniqueness http://bit.ly/82HdMx [...]
Januar 17th, 2010 at 18:30
@Tim:
Using Hagel and Singer’s terminology, I think of uniqueness in terms of “product” and relationship in terms of “customer”.
This immediately raises the question of the third Hagel and Singer dimension, namely “infrastructure”. I suppose that corresponds to the bottom and left regions of the diagram. However, this comparison does not hold up perfectly, since Hagel and Singer were talking about business models, not innovation.
Graham