No Bullsh*t Strategy

In an ecosystem different organisms don’t “compete” with each other, trying to drive the others to extinction. Instead they work together, symbiotically, to create a healthy overall system. They each have a particular “job” to do, and those jobs complement the jobs of the others around them.

a strategy laid out as a single piece of flowing prose is far easier to share than one in deck form, which is always going to be incomplete and disconnected without someone there to talk it through.

Most brands have lateral, unexpected competitors like this. Competitors against whom they’d have massive advantages if they just framed themselves that way.

1. Contrarian value means willingly sacrificing market share Central to contrarian value is a willingness to simply give your competitors big chunks of the market totally unopposed. You must be clear not only on what you offer but what you don’t offer too. You must be able to say: “Look, at the end of the day a lot of consumers are looking for X, and

It wasn’t simply that Southwest decided to “add an offering” to their service – the way that many competitively minded businesses will when trying to steal a march on their enemies. No, what they did was far more powerful: they chose to abandon the popular market offering altogether, regardless of how “profitable” it supposedly was.

When developing a contrarian value proposition, a good place to start is by identifying the areas you underperform in currently and then exploring what it would mean if you were to underperform even more. What if you were to deliberately suck at them? What would happen then? What opportunities would that open up?

Reason 1 – Subjective language isn’t specific or directional The job of a strategy is to tell you what to do. To give you an actionable plan. Subjective words like this don’t do that – instead they simply state the desired reaction to what you do. Both the Ritz and your local B&B might offer “outstanding service”, but clearly they are wildly di

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.

Here I’m going to lay out three ways of looking at things which may help you achieve this, all with the goal of uncovering the unique value you could offer. Method 1 – Context shift The beauty of this method, assuming it’s an option for you, is that it allows you unlock massive value without necessarily changing anything about your product at all.