Owning Your Ground

Image by Gidon Pico from Pixabay 

In my last post, I talked about the importance of avoiding stasis in your strategy, that being comfortable with the middle ground is a straight path to irrelevance. Maybe not today, but certainly someday.

So a response - an active, progressive strategy to do something is absolutely essential. It’s essential to be on the front foot and proactively define a clear plan for continued success.

That doesn’t, however, have to mean going after the big boys head-to-head. It doesn’t necessarily mean trying to become THE market leader. 

It could mean doing those things, but only if you’re able to fight that particular fight. That does require having some sort of dominant strength - usually in the form of deep pockets, or a unique advantage in a specific area such as distribution (which usually also translates into deep pockets). If you’re going to take on Coca-Cola directly, then you need to be ready resource-wise to wage that battle: marketing, distribution, pricing and promotions (i.e. deep pockets). For most folks, this isn’t usually a good idea because the odds for success are pretty low.

Instead, it might be better to carve out a niche, to stake your claim to a particular aspect of the market that has been underserved, overlooked or ignored. This might not make you the number 1 player in the market overall, but you can be number 1 in your niche, and become highly profitable (and dominant) in that particular space. 

The key is to understand where you can own customer mindshare (and then wallet-share). There are always aspects of markets that the leaders don’t serve or have interest in catering to. Fo example, the biggest players don’t have the financial interest, bandwidth or ability to cater to small to medium size customers. Or their interests may be in serving the mass market as opposed to segments that require deeper service levels. Or their offerings require opting in to a broader end-to-end proposition when material chunks of the customer base just want specific fit-for-purpose solutions.

There’s a profitable play in any of these arenas, but it requires targeted thinking, backed up by a commitment to that strategy (which has to include the strength to not be seduced by aspirations to be all things to all people). 

The point is, that there are multiple avenues one can pursue when setting strategy - the key is to identify the one that makes the most sense for you, develop it proactively and then go after it wholeheartedly.