Baseline Does Not Mean Equally Well Delivered
The Kano model includes a category of mandatory characteristics called must-be attributes: things customers simply take for granted. Their presence rarely creates delight, but their absence causes strong dissatisfaction. A clean hotel room. A door lock that works. The ability to reset your password in a digital service. Secure payment in an online store.

Noriaki Kano essentially treated these characteristics as the price of entry into a market: for a product to be considered a legitimate member of its category at all, it has to meet a certain minimum standard. However, there is an important nuance here: the model describes what customers expect, but it does not guarantee that every player in the market actually meets those expectations.

And that is where an opportunity for differentiation appears. Take the timely delivery of goods without damage. That is an obvious baseline expectation for a logistics company. Customers are entitled to expect it by default.

Would it be strange for a company to build its messaging around the promise, “We’ll deliver on time and won’t break anything”? Based on my own experience as a customer, I can’t give an unequivocal “yes” to that question. It is strange only as long as the entire market really does work that way. If I have ordered delivery ten times, waited longer than promised eight times, and received damaged goods three times, the situation changes. The promise “Delivered within two days. If your shipment is damaged, we’ll reimburse you” is no longer a meaningless statement of the obvious. It becomes positioning and a value proposition that address a real problem of mine, one that other solutions fail to solve.

A Point of Parity Relative to What?
Kevin Keller distinguishes between points of parity and points of difference.

Points of parity are characteristics a product needs in order for customers to consider it a legitimate member of the category. They can be divided into category points of parity, the must-haves, and competitive points of parity, which neutralize competitors’ unique advantages. Points of difference are what make customers see one brand as more attractive than another.

For Keller, points of parity are the required minimum, a kind of hygiene factor. His main point is that brand positioning cannot be built on differences alone: if a product fails to meet the market’s minimum expectations, its uniqueness will not matter to anyone. But there is also the real world, where packages arrive late and damaged. There are markets where average delivery speeds are extremely slow.

And that raises an interesting question for me: if something is considered a point of parity in the customer’s mind, but most real alternatives fail to meet that standard, does it remain a point of parity when an actual purchase decision is being made?
Formally, yes. In practice, not quite, because customers are not comparing a product with some abstract category standard. They are choosing between real alternatives. And this brings us to April Dunford.

Don’t Compare Your Product with an Ideal Market
One of the central ideas in Dunford’s approach to positioning is to look not at the market in general, but at the customer’s real competitive alternatives. What would someone do if your product did not exist? Buy a competitor’s product? Stick with their current solution? Do the work manually? Change nothing at all? The product’s value and differentiation should then be identified relative to those options.

I think this is an extremely sensible and practical way to think about baseline quality, because the statement “This is a baseline characteristic, so you can’t build positioning around it” implicitly assumes that the entire market already provides that baseline characteristic. That is far from always true, and it is better to check.

Buy from Your Competitors
There is little point in relying on competitors’ websites for this: nobody is going to write, “We reply to enquiries within four days,” “Our account manager doesn’t know half the product specifications,” “Delivery is sometimes a week late,” or “Technically, you can return the product, but we’ll do everything possible to make you regret trying.”

So it makes sense to read reviews, comments and forums, and to conduct mystery shopping: send enquiries, make calls, use chat support, place orders and go through the customer journey yourself. Research not only the core function of the product, but the entire process around buying and using it: response times, quality of information, ease of ordering, payment options, delivery times, returns, support and post-purchase communication. Everything a company may think of as “service around the product” can easily be perceived by the customer as part of the product itself.

And if it turns out that an important baseline expectation is regularly not met by many players in the market, the company has a very real opportunity to differentiate itself. Not because it has invented a new product characteristic, but because it delivers the category’s old promise better than everyone else. It provides baseline quality.

The Shelf Life of This Kind of Differentiation
There is one significant downside to this kind of differentiation: it may not work for long. If one player starts guaranteeing replies within two hours, delivery within two days, or returns without putting customers through seven circles of hell, competitors may catch up fairly quickly. What was a noticeable difference yesterday may become the market norm again tomorrow.

So I would not treat this kind of differentiation as something you discover once and put into the brand guidelines for the next ten years. If your positioning relies on the market failing to deliver baseline quality, you need to keep monitoring the market and periodically mystery-shop it again. From there, it all depends on how observant and quick your competitors are.

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The bottom line: baseline quality is not only a product category, but a competitive one. Sometimes, “we simply do properly what you already expect us to do” really is painfully weak positioning. And sometimes the strongest competitive advantage in the market is hidden in that very word: “properly.”

September 2, 2026