Sutherland's Buc-ee's lesson: fix the pain nobody else fixes

Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of Ogilvy, has been telling founders to stop competing where everyone else is competing.

His argument, as reported by Inc., is that fixing a customer pain point nobody else has bothered with often performs better than chasing features or price.

The example he uses is Buc-ee's, the American roadside chain whose reputation rests on its lavatories rather than its petrol.

Every motorway stop sells fuel and sandwiches. Almost none of them treat the toilets as the product.

That is the whole point of the argument. The neglected thing is neglected precisely because it does not look like a competitive axis, which is why owning it is hard to copy quickly and hard to price against.

For a founder, the practical version is unglamorous. List the parts of your customer's experience that everyone in your category treats as overhead, then work out which one they complain about most.

Feature races and price cuts are both easy for a competitor to answer within a quarter. A reputation for being the only firm that handles the annoying bit is answered more slowly, because rivals must first accept that the annoying bit matters.

Sutherland is asserting a pattern, not presenting a study, and Buc-ee's is a single example chosen after the fact.

Treat it as a prompt rather than a proof. The cheap experiment is to ask ten customers what part of dealing with your category they dread, and see whether any competitor has an answer.

If nobody does, that is the gap. If everybody does, you are back to features and price, which is where you started.