No Bullsh*t Strategy

look at the weird case of the Savannah Bananas, a minor league baseball team in the USA. The Bananas took the hugely unorthodox step of deciding to neglect the seemingly non-negotiable core of their whole industry: being good at baseball. What they did instead was to remove budget from the playing side of the business and invest it in the fan exper

This shows the profound power of contrarian value. By abandoning large but highly contested market space, and settling instead for small but uncontested space (which, crucially, other brands can’t readily enter), you create the conditions for massive profitability. A “walled garden” of your very own right in the middle of a raging battlefield. Who

Back when they were successful, Nokia dominated the market position for robust, cheap, everyman phones. They didn’t realise this was their position, of course, because it was so frigging huge that it appeared to them that they simply dominated the phone market in general. What put things into relief, however, was the emergence of the iPhone – a pro

For the first few years of their existence Airbnb was a product without a strategy. They knew what they sold and they knew people liked it, but they didn’t quite know why people liked it – and so had no way of knowing how to forge a path forward in the market. Was the product popular because it was cheaper than hotels? Was their offering an economy

What do you offer now, even if inadvertently or only slightly, which is unexpected or weird in the category? Whatever it is, it’s probably very subtle and largely accidental, but usually there’s something there – especially in businesses that are doing well. There will be something that the market has picked up on and is enjoying which you haven’t

So bottom line, when a brand from an “outside” category starts to deliver the expected value offering of another category, it will automatically find itself in fresh market space. It will automatically be doing something unique, and it will automatically have leverage that the other brands in that space don’t have, simply because they are so differ

Understanding that consumer motivations are far more complex than product categories make them appear has the potential to open up a whole new world of value offerings for you. Ones which other brands in your category would never have dreamt of, because they’re so busy tending to the category-specific ways people arrive at them.

Ultimately the true competitor is anything that will steal attention from you and make you lose a sale.

By drawing themselves in the direction of that unexpected category, brands profit on two counts: 1.They gradually differentiate themselves from their “obvious” category, and yet… 2.Will also never truly match their “new” category, and so will wind up in the uncontested market space we are seeking, just like this: