We wrote two days ago about the benefits of counter-branding, in which you conceptually go in the opposite direction of your industry in order to snatch up customers who are in the minority (so Universal successfully opened the musical Mamma Mia! on the same weekend as The Dark Knight in order to attract demographics uninterested in the blockbuster). But an article in the Sunday New York Times illustrates an even more radical form of counter-branding: what might be called anti-branding, or setting yourself up as the prime alternative to an industry's dominant product. The subject of the article? Microsoft's Zune, the portable mp3 player that isn't that shiny white Apple product (yes, we know they make them in other colors, too.)

Author Rob Walker isn't shy about listing the Zune's several arguable non-branding advantages over the iPod--very cooly, it allows you to trade songs and playlists very easily with other Zune owners--but suspects that the typical Zune buyer's prime motivation is that owning a Zune practically screams: "I DIDN'T BUY THE iPOD!"

"The cafe patron checking for other Zune owners is less likely to find one than to arouse mild curiosity about his eccentric product choice," Walker says. "Meanwhile, owning an iPod seems roughly as individualistic as a gray flannel suit. Add to this those Apple ads pitting a cool Mac against a hapless PC: they may boost sales, but they have also inspired vitriol among those who find Apple loyalists snobby and smug."

The iPod is sort of a special case, according to Walker, in that, somehow, it has managed to conjure simultaneously an aura of elitism (in both the good and bad sense) and an aura of ubiquity. Still, the lesson for any business offering some sort of product--good or service--in an area with one obvious dominating force is clear. And since that dominating force is likely to be proferred by one of the big guys, it is small businesses especially that should take the lesson of the Zune to heart.