The eleventh Block and Limitation to Business Genius is invisible competitive advantage.
Or, to put it another way, having a unique selling proposition (USP) that’s incredibly hard for others to see.
If we want to excel in this area, it’s vital we:
- make it easy for others to recognise what makes our business offering different;
- make it easy for others to recognise what a difference that difference can make to them!
Take Inspector Morse, for example.
Back in the early 1980s – according to the American Spectator journalist Larry Thornberry – TV cop shows like Miami Vice and Hill Street Blues were full of fast cars and blaring rock music.
But then along came Morse (based on the novels by Colin Dexter, and starring the actor John Thaw) which offered something ‘refreshingly different from the usual cop show’.
Morse wasn’t your average police inspector. Far from it. He was a ‘cerebral, middle-aged, somewhat grumpy intellectual snob’, who had studied Classics at Oxford, and had a passion for poetry and opera.
And, thanks to this point of difference – together with the show’s serene soundtrack – Morse went on to become instantly recognisable around the world, not least in the UK where it was routinely watched by 15 million people!
So you may want to consider this, if you’re aiming to UP! your competitive advantage.
Inspector Morse didn’t only have something uniquely special about it; it also had something special that viewers valued, and didn’t have to search too hard to find.
Morse, however, is just the tip of a massive iceberg.
All kinds of businesses over the years have found Genius ways of differentiating themselves from their rivals, in order to gain an edge …
Carl Fabergé, for example, (who became the official artist-jeweller to the Russian Tsar in 1885) gained his edge through exceptional craftsmanship and quality, and his distinctive Fabergé eggs are now universally recognised across the globe.
By contrast, Sam Walton – the Business Genius founder of Wal-Mart (the largest retailer in the world) – gained his edge by developing a dynamic ‘low price, stack it high, and let it fly’ retail strategy.
Fortunately, with a little imagination, the world’s your oyster – as they say – when it comes to creating and sustaining superior performance.
Georgio Armani, for example, gained his edge by providing exceptional design, Singapore Airlines by providing exceptional customer service, Dolby and Stradivari by providing exceptional sound quality, and Bloomberg by providing exceptionally fast and reliable business news. And so the list goes on from the Financial Times’ distinctive pink pages to Dyson’s bagless vacuum cleaner.
Fundamentally, however, the underlying principle is the same. The key to competitive advantage is making sure your business ‘Never copies mediocrity!’ and continually asks the question, ‘How can we do things differently to make things better around here?’
Or, as the marketing Genius Philip Kotler illuminates, it’s built upon you being able to do something others ‘cannot or will not match’.
And, finally, here’s one bonus ladder of thought.
Michael E. Porter – the Harvard academic who’s best known for his theories on the five forces of competitive advantage – managed to gain his edge from turning himself into the world’s leading expert on … competitive advantage! Now that’s Business Genius!
UP! YOUR COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
NUGGET
In the early 1900s, Coca-Cola – founded by the chemist Dr John Stith Pemberton (in Atlanta, 1886) – faced a serious commercial challenge.
The lucrative ‘little tonic syrup mixed with water and baking soda’ was in danger of being imitated, despite the large amounts of money it was spending on marketing and advertising.
This obviously meant it needed something else to boost its competitive advantage, and quickly, in order to still stand out from the crowd.
So what did Coca-Cola do?
Well, it leveraged the design Genius of Earl R. Dean (who worked for the Root Glass Company) who helped them come up with a radically new type of bottle. A bottle with unique contours inspired by the shape of the cocoa pod.
Consequently, ever since it first appeared in 1916, Coke’s iconic bottle remains instantly recognisable the world over.
In fact, in early 2014 (almost 100 years later) Coca-Cola ingeniously decided to take this classic idea one step further.
It started to use the same design for its large 2-litre plastic bottles, too, together with the edgy strapline: ‘Happiness is in a new bottle.’
So, maybe ask yourself how you could potentially design a better way forwards in the work that you do.
USEFUL TIPS AND
ESCAPE STRATEGIES
If you want to UP! your competitive advantage, here are three practical tips and strategies that can help. Please note, however, that when we’re talking about competitive advantage here, it doesn’t solely have to apply to the private sector (i.e. to those selling financial services, snazzy clothes, or fizzy drinks).
On the contrary.
The concept that better never stops is becoming increasingly important in the public sector, too (e.g. for councils wanting to provide higher quality services than other councils, and for schools and colleges wishing to be more appealing to students than other schools and colleges, etc.).
Anyway, whatever it is you do for a living, please link the key messages back to your own unique situation.
1 OUT-THINK TO OUT-SMART
In the fiercely competitive world of modern business, it’s vital we keep our thinking as sharp as possible.
Or, as Michael Bergdahl emphasises in his book What I Learned from Sam Walton: How to compete and thrive in a Wal-Mart world, ‘If you want to avoid being crushed by your competition you have to out-think, out-plan, out-work, and out-execute, 52 weeks a year.’
Woolworths, for example, used to have an edge in business for many years (as did HMV, Blockbuster, Golden Wonder Crisps and Clinton Cards). But, having an edge, and retaining an edge, are not the same thing!
So to prevent strategic drift from happening to you, I’d strongly recommend two pieces of valuable advice (the first from the innovation expert Roger von Oech, and the second from the Mavericks at Work authors William C. Taylor and Polly Labarre):
- Bear in mind it’s not always enough to go for the right answer in business. Sometimes we need to go for the second right answer, or the third right answer, because that way we’ll be far less predictable.
- Bear in mind it’s not always enough to look at best practice in business, because that’ll only tell us what our competitors are doing right now.
Far better to also look at next practice, so you and your business don’t get left behind.
2 GO FOR INNOVATIVENESS
One of the most common mistakes businesses make with competitive advantage is they focus too much on innovation and not enough on innovativeness.
Yes, of course, they overlap, but they’re not the same thing.
According to Mark O’Hare in his 1988 book Innovate! How to Gain and Sustain Competitive Advantage, he writes how ‘innovations can take a company forwards’ but ‘innovativeness can take it much further’.
If we spend all our time developing the new X17 gadget, for example, it’s very possible someone else will come along with an even better X17+, X18 or X19, before the paint’s had time to dry.
After all, look at what happened to BlackBerry. According to David Robertson (writing in The Times in March 2012): ‘For many years, BlackBerry dominated the smartphone market but the arrival of the iPhone and other devices with web browsing and media applications caused BlackBerry’s market share to fall by 75 per cent, and its profits to fall by two-thirds, in a single year.’
Developing innovativeness, therefore, is arguably the wiser strategy (e.g. by helping employees build their creativity capacity by attending regular lateral thinking training programmes, or by reading books like W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy to help expand their minds). That way, a business will be better placed to come up with innovation, after innovation, after innovation … Innovativeness appears to hold the key to what O’Hare calls ‘defensible competitive advantage’, because ‘without this, innovation is tactical, not strategic’.
3 FLY LIKE THUNDERBIRDS
Back in the 1960s the Genius Gerry Anderson created a highly successful TV phenomenon known as Thunderbirds.
It used a special technique called supermarionation, involving puppets suspended by thin metal wires, whose mouths moved up and down using remote controls to create the illusion they were speaking.
Anyway, the point is, it was different and, if you want to gain competitive advantage in business, it’s difference not blandness that will help you achieve it.
After all, that’s how Arthur Baldwin Turnure gained an edge in 1892 when he founded a very different type of magazine (Vogue), and Pierre Omidyar gained an edge in 1997 when he provided a very different way of auctioning online (eBay).
BUSINESS GENIUS IN ACTION:
NEXT STEPS …
In summary, if you want to UP! your competitive advantage, here’s how:
- Pinpoint to what extent your competitive advantage is clearly visible (because if your business offering looks much the same everyone else’s – in the eyes of potential competitors – you could end up as transparent as H. G. Wells’s 1897 creation, The Invisible Man).
- Investigate how others have succeeded in developing a USP (as we did earlier with Inspector Morse, Fabergé, the Financial Times and Earl R. Dean’s iconic Coca-Cola bottle, because exploring the successes of others can often inspire us to forge our own).
- Leverage the power of innovativeness (because – as Mark O’Hare points out – focusing on innovation alone is seldom more than tactical).
- Orchestrate a plan to look at next practice, not just best practice (to help you avoid strategic drift, and being left behind in a fast-changing world).
- Target being different (however – like Thunderbirds, Vogue and eBay – just make sure what makes you different is genuinely valued by others).
UP!SPIRATION
‘The only sustainable competitive advantage is an organisation’s ability to learn faster than the competition.’
Peter M. Senge (senior lecturer, MIT)