Put simply: if people don’t care

What these guys missed – along with every other self-loathing brand – is that there is no such thing as a “desirable” or “undesirable” market position. What makes something exciting or not is how you execute it, and how much you commit to it. Does Ryanair have a sexy aspirational strategy? Not at all. But they have fun with it and execute with

If you do this well, you’ll find that you don’t actually need to think of your business and the market as two separate things which you need to “match”. Instead you just need to identify the things about your business that the market is favouring. Those things already fit and simply need to be codified as a strategy you can execute going forwards –

Mars, the chocolate giant, manufactures its bars more cheaply than its competitors, and uses that extra cash to buy premium shelf space in retailers. Is this a value-oriented strategy? Not at all. In fact it arguably strips value from consumers. But does it work? Certainly. It’s a classic non-value strategy. Compare this, however, to a

there is no such thing as a “desirable” or “undesirable” market position. What makes something exciting or not is how you execute it, and how much you commit to it. Does Ryanair have a sexy aspirational strategy?

Pretty straightforward – however, it is at this point that we need to acknowledge that there are two ways a business can arrive at such a position, depending on what kind of company it is: •Is it a company that “weirds the normal”? •Or is a company that “normalises the weird”? This is a crucial distinction which you need to get straight in your

you instead need to shift your perspective to see your competitors as other things people might buy instead of you. Often you will find, as with the Harley example, that these are wildly outside your direct category. If you think back to Southwest Airlines and put yourself in their shoes, you might have reasonably concluded that passengers were

If you simply develop a strategy “out of thin air”, without observing the tendencies of your business as it is, even if the idea is brilliant in the abstract it will probably fail because it won’t match the company you have. In my experience you cannot really “change” a business from one thing to another; all you can really do is focus and

You must remove all subjective language from your strategy and see what’s left. What is subjective language? Anything that’s in the eye of the beholder, anything that’s a judgement, words like: •Good •Great •Incredible •World-class •Best •Smart •Etc.