There is a view that all you need to do is study other successes in the market and copy that formula, maybe tweak it a bit, but essentially it is a sure bet, right?
For example, real estate, where districts like SoHo in New York, where the old warehouse and factory district became an uber cool place to live, long before people used phrases such as ‘uber cool’.
Then what happened in SoHo, it became gentrified, marble bathrooms, luxury trinkets were added and boom multi-million dollar apartments sprang up. It was a way of making money.
The next stage was the copying machine went to full throttle and real estate executives all over the globe used the same formula, even building fake old warehouse-style buildings with exposed beams, high ceilings, wood floors and exposed brickwork. Then flogging them to the well-to-do execs at huge sums of money. They even copied, especially in the US, the naming acronyms model too. So everything became shortened to be trendy. SoSePla was actually short for South of the Sewage Plant.
The existing local populations and communities became displaced, alienated and destroyed. In came the high rollers, the fancy restaurants, and ching, ching the money rolled in.
The problem with copying something without it having any real substance, history, community or soul behind it, other than a money making formula, is that it is unlikely to last. There is no substance to it.
It is similar on a much smaller scale in life and business. If you copy someone, you will never be able to replicate the real reason for that person or businesses success. You simply can not replicate or copy the soul, passion, and the ‘why’ of someone or something else. You can’t replicate uniqueness.
Don’t copy, be you, as you are amazing.
Philip Dodson 