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You are here: Home / Bookshelf / Competitive Strategy: How to Step Up Your Game

Competitive Strategy: How to Step Up Your Game

October 31, 2007 •

Image of “Marketing Playbook” Image of “Seeing What’s Next”

As a mar­ket­ing strate­gist, I often get a bird’s eye view of how high tech com­pa­nies approach com­pet­i­tive strat­egy. It can be sur­pris­ing to see how lit­tle “qual­ity time” is allo­cated to a thought­ful analy­sis of the under­ly­ing dri­vers of the com­pet­i­tive envi­ron­ment, or assess­ing which moves are likely to lead to the best results. As a result com­pa­nies fail to get the com­pet­i­tive advan­tage they seek, and over time fall prey to the forces of com­modi­ti­za­tion.

For high tech com­pa­nies and busi­ness unit lead­ers, the two books out­lined here pro­vide con­crete guid­ance on smarter ways to plot com­pet­i­tive strat­egy. With prac­tice they can really help you step up your game, and increase your chances of secur­ing a mar­ket lead­er­ship posi­tion.

5 Plays for Capturing & Keeping Market Share

John Zag­ula and Richard Tong are for­mer Microsoft mar­ket­ing gurus, now part­ners at a Seat­tle area VC firm, Igni­tion Part­ners. In The Mar­ket­ing Play­book they share their insights on how to win lead­ing mar­ket posi­tions, even when enter­ing a mar­ket arena dom­i­nated by much stronger play­ers.

Their book describes how to apply each of 5 mar­ket­ing strat­egy plays that have been per­fected at Microsoft and proven else­where, includ­ing star­tups they’ve worked with at Igni­tion. They describe these plays, with real-world case stud­ies, in The Mar­ket­ing Play­book: Five Bat­tle-Tested Plays for Cap­tur­ing and Keep­ing the Lead in Any Mar­ket. The plays they show­case are:

  • The Drag Race
  • The Plat­form Play
  • The Stealth Play
  • The Best-of-Both Play
  • The High-Low Play

Zag­ula and Tong also explain how and when to shift from play to play, how to assess indus­try con­di­tions, tim­ing, the mar­ket envi­ron­ment, and your own com­pa­ny’s capa­bil­i­ties and resources. Their writ­ing is very acces­si­ble:

Pick­ing the right play for any par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tion begins with dis­cov­er­ing the gaps that rep­re­sent the best oppor­tu­ni­ties in your over­all indus­try. Doing home­work on your indus­try will help you dis­cern between a pot­hole, a chal­leng­ing but man­age­able leap, and an insur­mount­able grand canyon. That home­work can spell the dif­fer­ence between being lauded as a cham­pion, being for­got­ten as an also-ran, or being scraped off the pave­ment as road­kill.

Predicting How to Win Via Disruptive Innovation

See­ing What’s Next can pro­vide guid­ance on how to assess your com­pet­i­tive posi­tion and plan a mar­ket entry strat­egy when your com­pany is con­tem­plat­ing a new prod­uct or ser­vice offer­ing that will be a dis­rup­tive inno­va­tion.

This book intro­duces some con­cep­tual tools to help pick the oppor­tu­ni­ties you’re most likely to win, the ones where you’ll face fewer (or delayed) threats from the estab­lished play­ers. It can also help you pre­dict which com­pet­i­tive sit­u­a­tions are so fraught that your com­pany risks turn­ing into “road­kill” if you go head to head with the entrenched lead­ers.

See­ing What’s Next is the third book in the series on dis­rup­tive inno­va­tions by Clay­ton Chris­tensen. In this book Chris­tensen responds to read­ers’ requests for more con­crete guid­ance on how to apply his the­o­ries of inno­va­tion to real-life busi­ness sit­u­a­tions.

The book begins by recap­ping Chris­tensen’s frame­work for iden­ti­fy­ing when a mar­ket oppor­tu­nity may be ripe for dis­rup­tive inno­va­tion:

  • Non­con­sumers (peo­ple who aren’t buy­ing or using the estab­lished com­pa­nies’ prod­ucts)
  • “Under­shot cus­tomers” (peo­ple whose needs or want aren’t being met by the incum­bents)
  • “Over­shot cus­tomers” (peo­ple who feel they are pay­ing too much for fea­tures they don’t need or don’t value)

Then Chris­tensen explains how to assess com­peti­tors’ busi­ness mod­els to see if they are likely to be moti­vated or capa­ble of respond­ing effec­tively to your dis­rup­tive inno­va­tion. (He refers to this as the “RPV the­ory” or method of analy­sis.)

Chris­tensen’s RPV the­ory out­lines a way for you to assess your com­peti­tors’:

  • Resources: do they have the cash, cap­i­tal, tech­nol­ogy, peo­ple, prod­ucts, IP, etc.?
  • Processes: do they the capa­bil­i­ties and exper­tise to effi­ciently and effec­tively respond to this inno­va­tion, in ways that cus­tomers value?
  • Val­ues: when it comes time to allo­cate resources and pri­or­i­ties, will they want to respond to this oppor­tu­nity or pay more atten­tion to “other options on their plate?”

Zag­ula and Tong’s “stealth play” implies that mar­ket lead­ers remain unaware when smaller play­ers tar­get a mar­ket niche. Chris­tensen has a slightly dif­fer­ent take on this. It’s not that those com­peti­tors are obliv­i­ous to your threat — it’s that they either don’t care or can’t respond. Chris­tensen explains how you can pre­dict when estab­lished play­ers will gen­er­ally choose to ignore a dis­rup­tive inno­va­tion, with a frame­work for assess­ing when they lack the moti­va­tion or abil­ity to respond. Here are some sig­nals:

  • When the new­comer appears to be pur­su­ing a mar­ket that’s too small to appeal to the estab­lished com­pa­nies.
  • When the new­comer is attempt­ing to serve cus­tomers that are unat­trac­tive or unprof­itable for the incum­bents to serve.
  • When the busi­ness model employed by the new­comer is one that the incum­bents can’t match.

What I like about both books is the way they pro­vide a use­ful frame­work for help­ing mar­keters and strate­gists think things through, and apply a more coher­ent approach to com­pet­i­tive strat­egy. Once mas­tered, these approaches will really up your game — and increase your com­pa­ny’s chances of being a mar­ket win­ner.

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Reflec­tions on life, travel, books, and yoga. Think­ing out loud about the pur­suit of mind­ful­ness and well-being.

Learn­ing how to recover from the loss of a beloved spouse, and then to find a trans­for­ma­tive path for­ward.

About Me

Semi-retired marketing exec, transitioning from a career in high tech. Now "managed" by two Tonkinese cats. Missing travel and friends on the West Coast. Avid reader and foodie. Staying active with long walks, biking, kayaking and yoga.

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