Be Original, Counter Trend and Be Willing to Travel on a Road Less Traveled

In November 2015, while I was still a professor of Computer Science at Union University, I drove from Jackson, Tennessee to Nashville to attend a presentation by Dr. Ming Wang. The talk was given on November 19, 2015, and the phrase that stayed with me was simple but powerful: the inversion of supply and demand.

I remember that drive because it was not convenient. Jackson to Nashville is not a small errand. It is the kind of trip you make only when you believe there may be something worth hearing on the other side. That evening, there was.

Dr. Wang's presentation was framed around a practical marketing lesson: be original, counter-trend, and be willing to travel on a road less traveled. The slides were about marketing, but the lesson was larger than marketing. It was about how to survive in a crowded world where everyone is making noise, everyone is competing for attention, and ordinary claims no longer separate one organization from another.

The Inversion of Supply and Demand

In a traditional market, demand is the scarce side. Customers look for products. Patients look for doctors. Students look for schools. Employers wait for applicants. But in many modern markets, that relationship has changed. Supply has exploded. There are more products, more services, more websites, more experts, more ads, more content, and more options than any person can reasonably evaluate.

That is the inversion of supply and demand. The challenge is no longer simply whether a business can provide a good service. The challenge is whether anyone can notice it, remember it, trust it, and choose it. This is why marketing became so important to companies like Google and Facebook. They sit at the center of attention, search, targeting, and discovery in a world where supply is abundant and attention is scarce.

Dr. Wang's slides named the practical symptoms clearly: information overload, a high noise level, and the cruel catch-22 that without marketing there may be no business, but without business there may be no money for marketing. The higher the water level, the higher the boat must be.

Differentiation Is Not a Slogan

One of the strongest ideas in the presentation was the definition of differentiation. A marketing message is truly differentiated only if, when your business name is replaced by another business name, the message no longer works.

That is a demanding test. Many businesses say they offer quality, service, satisfaction, creativity, or low prices. But those are often not differentiators anymore. Customers assume quality should be present. A competitor can also be creative. A competitor can lower price. A broad product line can even weaken differentiation because it makes the organization harder to remember.

Real differentiation has a sharper edge. It may come from being first, being the only one, owning an attribute, having a unique heritage, being a specialist, having credible leadership, or doing something in a way others cannot easily copy. A differentiated business stands out among the many choices a customer faces. It also lasts longer because it is harder to duplicate.

The Five Steps of the Road Less Traveled

The presentation organized the road less traveled into five steps.

1. Be differentiated. Do what others are not doing. Find a message that would collapse if another name were substituted for yours.
2. Focus. The common path is to offer a broad line of services. The harder path is to decide what not to do.
3. Use one message. Multiple messages may feel comprehensive, but they often confuse the market. One clear message is easier to remember.
4. Do not sell; educate. Education builds trust. It respects the intelligence of the audience.
5. Tell a story rather than sell a product. People remember stories because stories connect facts to meaning.

These steps are counter-trend because they require sacrifice. Focus means saying no. One message means leaving many true but secondary things unsaid. Education means resisting the pressure to push for an immediate sale. Story means letting people see why the work matters before asking them to buy.

Why Psychology Matters

During the Q&A session, I asked Dr. Wang for more detail about the inversion of supply and demand. His answer connected marketing to human psychology. He pointed out that when Mark Zuckerberg was a student at Harvard University, he studied Computer Science and Psychology. That combination mattered.

Facebook was not just a technical system. It was a system built around human behavior: identity, attention, belonging, curiosity, social proof, comparison, memory, and emotion. Understanding technology was necessary, but understanding people was equally important. In business, the best technology does not win automatically. The technology that understands human motivation often wins.

This point has become even more important today. AI can generate content, code, images, ads, and websites at extraordinary speed. That means supply will increase even more. The bottleneck will move further toward attention, trust, judgment, and human meaning. Psychology will not become less important in the age of AI. It will become more important.

A Lesson for Builders

For technology builders, this lesson is especially relevant. Engineers often believe that better features should speak for themselves. Sometimes they do. Usually they do not. A technically superior product still needs a position in the mind of the customer. It needs a clear reason to exist. It needs a story.

The road much traveled is to copy what everyone else is doing: the same claims, the same layouts, the same buzzwords, the same list of services, the same race to add more. The road less traveled is to become unmistakable. That requires originality, but not originality for its own sake. It requires originality disciplined by market need, truth, focus, and courage.

Conclusion

Looking back, I am glad I made the drive from Jackson to Nashville. The lesson was worth the road. Be original. Counter trend. Be willing to travel on a road less traveled. Those words sound like a marketing slogan, but they are also a life strategy.

When everyone is following the same path, the unusual path may feel risky. But in a noisy world, the risk may actually be the opposite: becoming so ordinary that no one can remember why you matter.

Based on notes and slides from Dr. Ming Wang's November 19, 2015 presentation, Be original, counter-trend and be willing to travel on a road less traveled - marketing 101.