When the Best Defense Is Growth
If your business is targeted by a larger competitor, the natural response is to want to play defense—to squeeze pricing, take special care of the channel, maybe do some promotions and guerrilla marketing. We’d never advise you to take your eye off a competitor, but the defensive reaction isn’t always the best way to fight. A larger competitor will expect you to do these things, and will usually be well prepared for siege warfare. They’ll be ready to match your pricing and outspend you in the channel in order to drive you out of the market.
Sometimes the best defense isn’t defending at all, it’s finding ways to grow the market. If your customers are still early in the adoption curve, and especially if there are new segments you can open up, it’s usually more cost-effective for you to bring in new users than it is to defend every inch of the turf you hold today.
Help! Microsoft Is Targeting Our Business
Recently we’ve been hearing that more and more. The companies being targeted usually assume they’ve being singled out for special attention from Microsoft, but when you add up all the reports, a different picture emerges. Microsoft is targeting almost every major tech company, all at once. This is a fairly new behavior for Microsoft, and it means the rules of competing with Redmond have changed as well.
Not so many years ago, Microsoft was famous for its ability to focus on one unifying goal. The cry would go out: “Make Windows the dominant OS,” or “Make Internet Explorer the dominant browser,” and the company would rally around that cry.
Today, the threats to Microsoft are different. The famous “Internet Services Disruption” memo written last October by Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie is notable because it attempted to focus the company against an entire sector of the tech industry, rather than against a single competitor or product.
Defend
Winning Tough Competitive Battles
“Battle stations!”
The more successful you are, the more competition you’ll face. Maybe you built a new market that’s now big enough to attract competitors, or to meet your growth targets you need to move into a market that already has incumbents. Fighting competitors is a very different discipline from pioneering green-field opportunities. You need a different mindset in the company, different types of marketing tools, and different business practices. Silicon Valley is littered with the memories of companies that couldn’t make this transition.
We’re veterans some of the toughest competitive battles in high tech. We can help you do it too.
What we deliver:
Competitive battle plan. We help you understand your competitors — not just who they are, but how they think and what they’re likely to do next. We help you evaluate the real advantages and disadvantages of your products relative to the competition. We teach you how to fight a guerrilla marketing war against a larger, better-funded competitor. And we teach you how to create a competitive spirit within your company, so competitiveness takes root and becomes a part of your culture.
Examples of Our Work
- A software company was being targeted by a bigger competitor. We helped it plan a licensing and market expansion strategy that outmaneuvered the competitor and left it shooting at yesterday’s markets.
- We designed a year-long counter-marketing campaign against a larger company that was seeking to take over a market. The campaign included a PR roadshow, presentations used by the sales force, collateral, online marketing using bulletin boards and blogs, enthusiast marketing via user groups, and other guerrilla tactics that we’re not supposed to talk about (nothing illegal or unethical, just tactics that work best when they’re used quietly). The result: stable market share even though our client was heavily outspent by the competitor.
Contact us to discuss your market and product definition needs.