Dev Patnaik
A24, Chili’s, and Barnes & Noble are finding growth in categories many had written off by resisting sameness and building playbooks around what makes them distinctive.
Casual observers may be forgiven for thinking that the only thing happening in the business world is artificial intelligence. Every week brings another announcement of a new language model, a new export policy, or a new fight over data centers. For public companies outside the tech sector, it can feel like the only way to get rewarded is with a credible AI narrative. It’s as if the whole country has become a company town.
Meanwhile, whole parts of the economy seem to have been quietly written off. Food, media, retail, and apparel are all being discussed like mature categories that are past their prime. That’s understandable. The margins are tighter. The growth stories are harder to tell. And the companies in these sectors seem to be trapped between rising costs, changing habits, online competition, and consumers who have learned to expect more for less.
But decline isn’t destiny. Despite all the headwinds, a few companies are finding ways to break out. They’re not doing that by expanding into new growth spaces. They’re winning in places that many executives had already stopped believing in. And that makes them worth a closer look.
Signs of Success
In contrast to their competitors, A24 is finding new ways to make movies matter. Chili’s is making casual dining feel alive again. And in an age when everyone was supposed to be done with brick-and-mortar retail, Barnes & Noble is opening new stores. These companies are defying the conventional wisdom about how to compete in their sectors.
In a world where giant media companies place massive bets on tentpole movies, independent studio A24 has broken out with smaller films that generate critical praise, cultural heat, and financial returns. Founded in 2012, the company quickly became an awards force with movies like Moonlight, Lady Bird, and Everything Everywhere All at Once. Studio giants like Disney and Paramount typically pay top dollar for pre-existing intellectual property with mass appeal. A24 looks for films that can connect deeply with niche audiences. This summer’s Backrooms was based on an online horror phenomenon and made for about $10 million. The film has grossed more than $350 million worldwide to date. A24 has developed a disciplined way to find stories that already have cultural energy, give unusual creators room to make them specific, and keep the economics small enough that a breakout can become enormously profitable.
Chili’s has been a standout player in the restaurant industry. As food and labor costs have climbed, consumers have become more selective about dining out, putting restaurants in a nasty squeeze. In that environment, Chili’s should have looked like another tired casual-dining chain from another era. Instead, the Brinker-owned restaurant has become one of the industry’s most surprising comeback stories. While much of the industry is fighting traffic declines, Chili’s posted a same-store sales gain of 25.3% last year. What makes Chili’s interesting is that it didn’t try to become more upscale, more health-forward, or more like a fast-casual brand. It leaned into the role it plays as a great place for friends to get together.
And then there’s retail. For years, Barnes & Noble looked like a company from another era. Physical bookstores seemed to be in permanent decline. When James Daunt took over in 2019, the obvious move would have been to run Barnes & Noble like an online retailer. Instead, he made the chain behave more like a collection of local bookstores. Stores got more authority. Inventory became more local. Hiring shifted toward book lovers who could also work the register. The results have been striking. In an industry that’s been shutting down locations, Barnes & Noble has added over 100 stores in the last two years.
What ties these companies together isn’t that they found some hidden growth market. They’re winning in categories that many experts have already trained themselves to dismiss. Which is exactly why they matter. Looking across all three, a pattern starts to emerge for a different kind of playbook.
Insights over Risk Taking
When they’re in trouble, many companies start looking for a dramatic move—a Hail Mary pass. Barnes & Noble, Chili’s, and A24 instead decided to focus on their customers. They’ve dramatically reduced their level of risk by focusing their playbooks on clear insights about the people they serve.
Chili’s understood that, for a lot of younger customers, casual dining isn’t just about food. It’s about getting together with friends. On the face of it, that’s not particularly insightful. The real a-ha is that young people today are often out of practice with how to do that. COVID and a life spent on screens have turned going out to eat into a complicated decision. And for many, there’s a fair bit of anxiety about the restaurant they choose being a bad experience, or worse, a rip-off. Chili’s approach to value is to assure young guests that, if they choose Chili’s, they won’t feel taken.
For their part, A24 has realized that viewing tastes are being shaped online long before they end up on movie screens. And Barnes & Noble has realized that, in a fractured culture, reading tastes are deeply tied to place. The company is leveraging local staff to tailor each bookstore’s selection to the local community’s interests.
Of course, once a company sees something important about its customers, it still has to decide how to act on that insight. That’s where creativity matters.
Creativity over Benchmarking
Too many companies formulate their playbooks by benchmarking what competitors are doing. Armed with an insight, the standouts didn’t build their playbooks by copying what everyone else in the category was doing. Instead, they came up with something original. They proceeded to solve customers’ needs in surprising ways.
Barnes & Noble is the clearest example of this. At a moment when many retailers were trying to become more efficient, more centralized, and more like online shopping, Barnes & Noble went in the other direction. It made the stores feel more local, more idiosyncratic, and more human. Before James Daunt took over, Barnes & Noble relied heavily on publisher-paid placement. Books were stacked in standardized blocks. Daunt replaced the block with the pyramid, a display built by local booksellers around titles they think their local readers will want. It gave local teams a way to make a judgment about what titles would pull readers in. It turned the front table from rented real estate into a form of curation. That move sounds small, but it changed the logic of how the whole store was run. Discovery drove the experience, not suppliers’ economics. Local taste replaced centralized merchandising. And a national chain started to feel more like a neighborhood bookstore.
Similarly, A24 didn’t try to beat the major studios at their own game by chasing bigger franchises and broader audiences. It built a system for spotting idiosyncratic stories and giving creators and directors an inordinate amount of freedom. Chili’s introduced a Triple Dipper, where you could mix and match three different appetizers and dips. It’s an ideal dish for younger guests to share with friends, and the visually compelling presentation of the dish quickly went viral on TikTok.
As strong as these playbooks are, it would be hard for a competitor to copy them. And that’s part of what makes them great. In all three cases, these companies are leveraging their own unique strengths.
Playing to Their Strengths
A24 doesn’t look like it should win. It doesn’t have the scale of the major studios. It doesn’t have a deep library of pre-existing intellectual property. It doesn’t have theme parks, streaming platforms, or global distribution muscle. What it does have is a very particular set of instincts. A24 knows how to spot cultural energy early. It backs unusual creators before everyone else sees what they can do. And it packages films in a way that makes specific audiences feel like the movie belongs to them. Those are real superpowers in their own right. Over time, they’ve allowed A24 to make smaller bets that can generate outsized cultural and financial returns.
You see a similar dynamic elsewhere. Barnes & Noble will never be able to outcompete Amazon for digital capabilities or fulfillment operations. Its advantage is human judgment: staff who can create experiences of curation, discovery, and local relevance. Chili’s superpower is its ability to create fun, social experiences around familiar, affordable food.
A24, Chili’s, and Barnes & Noble have each built a playbook that works because it could only really work for them. That alone is an advantage. When a company is under pressure, it’s easy to start looking at what the rest of the world is doing. Over time, companies in a given sector start to drift towards one another. Every player ends up with a playbook that looks like everyone else’s. Looking across the sector, it starts to look like a sea of sameness.
Fighting the Sea of Sameness
Neither A24 nor Chili’s nor Barnes & Noble found a hot new category. None of them stumbled into growth because the wind was at their backs. They’re winning in places where many of their peers had already accepted decline. And they’ve done it by resisting the impulse to benchmark their way to safety. Instead, they built playbooks around sharper insights, more creative choices, and a commitment to playing to their own strengths. In a sea of sameness, that kind of distinctiveness can look almost radical.
These companies defy the conventional wisdom of how to win in their given industries. Most restaurants are chasing the same value meals. Media companies have been pouring crazy money into franchises. Retailers have been resorting to discounting and staff cuts. The winners in each category are bucking these trends. And while each company is doing its own thing, they nonetheless embody some important takeaways for the rest of us.
To be sure, none of this is easy. And each of these playbooks could have just as easily ended in failure. Real insights are surprisingly difficult to come by. Creativity is tough under pressure. It’s much easier to follow the script than to write your own. But that’s the work. In categories that have drifted toward sameness, the opportunity is to see more clearly, think more originally, and build something that is unmistakably your own. In a category that’s under threat, the riskiest move may be to play the game like everyone else.
