Change the Game:
Doing Battle with the Big Guys

by Ethan Whitehill

There's a tremendous urgency in business today, and stopping what you’re doing scares the pants off most small business owners--even though what
you&'re doing isn&'t working anymore.

In the field of evolutionary biology, there's a theory called The Red Queen Principle. Named after a character from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, the principle is summed up in a remark made to Alice by the Red Queen: "In this place, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."

Applied to biology, the principle suggests that a fitness increase in one species will lead to a fitness decrease in another. It also implies that a species competing in this genetic arms race can only survive by continuously improving its design for some advantage.

That theory holds true in marketing, as well. A follower brand in a category with a strong leader must work twice as hard justto maintain its trailing position. It will never catch up as long as it continues to follow the rules set down by the leading brand.

To survive, small and even not-so-small businesses must switch direction, change the goal and break the "rules."

There's a tremendous urgency in business today, and stopping what you're doing scares the pants off most small business owners--even though what you're doing isn't working anymore.

Instead, companies dedicate considerable amounts of time and resources to "standing out." Loud, colorful ads. Big logos. Lots of exclamation points. They think they're creating that elusive advantage. But in an era of too much of everything, such efforts just make the consumer tired and numb. This plays right into the hands of the market leader. After all, an overwhelmed consumer will buy from the company they know best--the one in first place.

How, then, can small business compete when the competition has transformed low prices from a tactic to a strategy? How can small business compete when the competition can throw more money, more people and more resources into the ring?

Answer: change the game. Starbucks. Apple. Target. These brands won when they quit competing and wrote their own rules.

Whether it's the way that Apple makes computers easy, or Starbucks makes coffee culture, or Target makes low-price retail cool, offering something that can be had by interacting with one brand--and one brand only--is a big part of what changing the game is all about.

If you want to challenge big competitors, begin by doing the things they can't or won't do, addressing audiences they ignore, using channels they've never considered. Make their weaknesses your strengths. It's a military strategy that goes back, well, as far as war. Or at least as far back as 5th century BC when Chinese General Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, "So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak."

Need more proof? In a nationwide test to determine why people buy, price came in fifth, selection fourth, service third and quality second. Believe or not, the number-one reason people buy from one company over another is simply because they like that company better--they identify with them. Which is good news for small business. Because for the most part, consumers don't really like the market leader.

So, the question becomes not, "What products do you sell?" but rather "What ideas do you stand for?" Instead of trying to "position" themselves, companies need to take a position. Small businesses need to build their brands based on what they have to say as much as what they have to sell. Instead of spending all their time and energy talking about how different they are, they need to first truly be different.

Because here's what the consumer has learned that most brands have forgotten, "Life is too short."

Too short to worry about saving twenty-five cents on toothpaste. But not too short to worry about their sex life or saving the planet. Hence the success of Close-Up and Tom's of Maine.

The consumer wants to connect, to belong, to buy from a company that speaks to them and what they care about in a genuine voice. And from that company, they'll buy not only their toothpaste, but anything else they're selling.

Perhaps Victor Hugo says it best, "An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come."

Ethan Whitehill is the CEO of Two West, Inc. He can be reached by e-mail at ethanw@twowest.com or by phone at 816.471.3255.