Does your business know its unfair advantage? Does it drive your marketing strategy?
What does your company or brand do that the competition can’t do or won’t do? Or don’t they have an unfair advantage?
Is there a way to frame challenges in your category that give you a new way to market? I believe an unfair advantage can take plenty of forms and shapes. But your team may need a new lense or filter to see your category.
Thought Experiments and Mind-Bending Workshops
When I do a branding exercise with clients, they often struggle at first because it has a game-like quality. Over time, they get excited, eventually their unfair advantages begins to get unlocked. Typically, companies have a challenge unearthing their unique advantage because they think they are doing something different – when they follow the category’s rules and norms.
What Are Unfair Advantages?
- Distribution: You have an advantage that competitors can’t match or access. Only your products are sold through a unique channel or you have an different way to go to market compared to competition. Think Tupperware or Mary Kay Cosmetics.
- Category Insight: You create a brand that takes advantage of insight about a gap or white space in the category waiting to be filled. See Liquid Death or example.
- Network Effect: Your business has a network effect that makes you exceptionally qualified to bring select products to market because you already have essential relationships that competitors can’t match. This can be an eco-system, too, like Apple’s IOS. Or think back to early Facebook or LinkedIn days when connections created stronger networks – and every connection strengthened the network.
- Operational Efficiency: Your cost for manufacturing is significantly lower than the competition giving you a chance to put more resources into marketing activities than your competitors. Tesla has fewer parts, relies on few suppliers and had less trouble than traditional car companies.
- Patents, Trademarks, and Intellectual Property: You have intellectual property or patents that can’t be duplicated: an algorithm that no one else can use or Amazon’s one-click technology. Pepperidge Farm owns the goldfish shape for snacks.
- Alternative Profit Model: You rely on membership fees to earn profits, not products. Costco makes 75% profit from membership and only 25% from selling goods.
- Distinct and Ownable Packaging: If you are in consumer package goods, you have a unique form, package, and graphic design. Or shape that gives you an advantage that is meaningful to your audience. The Travaglina Gattinara wine bottle comes to mind. No one else can own this protected shape.
The Games We Play
The game we play with senior leaders is to explore how someone outside your industry would enter the category. And what can you learn from a new mind frame? And what unfair advantage might one company bring to a category they know little about but have a robust skill set? We break up into 4 teams and ask them to pick one of these questions. Then they see an industry/business through a fresh lens.
- How would Tiffany’s enter the hotel industry?
- What would Elon Musk enter the wine industry?
- How would McDonald’s change the insurance industry?
- What could Nordstrom teach a hospital about customer service?
- How would Costco price services if they got into consulting?
- What could Dyson bring to the cosmetics industry?
- How would Ikea enter the home construction industry?
After the exercise, we explored if some of the insights from the workshop could be examined at the company. How might their company be different if they saw their business through a new filter. Getting outside of the category through someone else’s filter can open your eyes to uncovering something you haven’t exploited as an unfair advantage.
What’s your unfair advantage that gives you a leg up?
You can set up a time to chat with me about your marketing challenges using my calendar. Email me jeffslater@themarketingsage.com Call me. 919 720 0995. The conversation is free, and we can explore if working together makes sense. Watch a short video about working with me.
Photo by Den Harrison on Unsplash
