I was in a fist fight once. I was fighting Greg. Greg was bigger than me. But I was tougher, at least, that’s what I thought. I was confident I’d win the fight. Greg and met in the common room of our boarding house. It was late, after lights out. It was winter. We circled one another for a while as a crowd of boys jumped out of their beds in the dormitory and gathered around. They cheered us on with advice on how to inflict maximum damage. Greg and I were 13 and neither of us was all that clued up on how this fighting thing worked.
The circling continued. Our rage and hatred for one another was thick, the crowd around us amplified the stakes. Humiliation, pain, blood, legend status. Oh, this was going to be a battle that the school would be talking about for years to come, just as soon as Greg threw that first punch.
“Come, are you going to hit me or what?” Greg asked threw clenched teeth.
“Nah, you throw the first punch, I’ll be throwing the last,” I think I said, but it might have been something more along the lines of, “no, you punch first.”
Thing is neither of us wanted to be the first person to hit the other, and no matter the insults we taunted each other with, it wasn’t enough to drive either one of us to action. It was a stalemate. After 10 minutes the crowd grew bored and walked away, now just shouting insults and me and Greg. In the end we called it a truce. Both of us believing we would have beaten the snot out of the other one, given half a chance.
Marketing, advertising
I have spent a large part of my adult life working across advertising and marketing. The thing that has struck me the most, working on either side of this divide, is how wildly at odds advertising and marketing people are when it comes to how companies and brands should communicate with customers.
On the one hand we have advertising agencies who are brimming with young creative people all wanting to make a name for themselves. The more daring and bold the campaign that a team sells to the client, the greater their chance of winning one of the prestigious advertising awards, and the more likely it is that you’ll be headhunted by one of the big agencies in New York, Chicago or London.
On the other side you have the client. The client is the CMO and her team. They’re responsible for creating demand for the products or services their company sells. At the same time, they are also the custodians of the brands they manage. Brands are all the attributes the marketing team has designed to be associated with their products or services.
Most of the marketing teams I’ve worked with tend to err on the side of caution. In fact, many companies I’ve done work for and with tend to be conservative in what they take to market. They tend not to want to be bold, when they rock the boat it mustn’t be too wild – more a gentle sway and not too often, either. They want to get attention for their brand, but not so much attention that it becomes uncomfortable. And this relates to all aspects of marketing. Pricing strategies err towards middle of the road and what’s expected. Where companies sell there products, how they promote and what products they develop more often than not are intended to follow what the rest of the market is doing.
The spectrum explained
If we plot this on a spectrum the ad agency is all the way on the left. What the advertising creative teams think is best for the brand is bold and daring. On the other side of the specturm, all the way on the right is boring, safe, dull. Most marketers and their CEO’s prefer campaigns that are wholesome, mildly humorous without being offensive, and that will be noticed, but won’t garner too much attention. So not all the way over to right, but definitely not near anything the ad agency would prefer they buy over on the left.
Winning vs. not losing
When Greg and I were circling one another, neither of us wanted to throw the first punch. We didn’t want to disrupt the status quo. Circling and taunting ensured that we could both walk away feeling that we were the good guy and that we would have won the fight. That is how most marketing, advertising and business decisions are made. Business leaders pretend to compete, but all they really want is to not lose, and the way you don’t lose is by never throwing a punch.
Not punching preserves the status quo. Nobody wins and the only people who lose are customers – mainly because there is no real competition in the market. Safe marketing, safe advertising, safe strategy, safe pricing, these are all ensure that nobody wins, but more importantly, no loses.
On the other side we have the ad agency model. They like to have their clients pick fights, and they are all about hitting a knock-out blow with a single punch. The equivalent of me when I boxed for the first and last time. I closed my eyes and swung with everything I had. And all my opponent had to do was stand back and let me tire myself out, or for me to lose my balance and fall over. Single punch knockouts happen, but they’re rare, and usually require an opponent to make a silly mistake. Also worth noting that ad agencies aren’t the ones fighting. They lose nothing if things go wrong.
In business, how do you know if you’re winning?
Then there’s the aggressive but considered business owner and marketer. They punch, but they do so repeatedly, and intelligently. They combine body blows with an occasional jab to the jaw and they move fast and are able to avoid their opponents’ attacks.
When you’re at the receiving end of good strategy it feels like you’re fighting an opponent who’s always 2 steps ahead of you, who always lands the punch were it hurts most and who’s able to avoid your every move.
And how do you know if you work for an organisation that has a good, aggressive, want to win strategy and a savvy marketing team? You know because the opposition always respond, they always retaliate, they throw punches every time you make a move. And most of the punches have little effect.
Businesses respond to competition when they feel threatened or when they believe they might be losing. You know you’re winning when your competition copy you or try to fight like you. And you’ll know when you have your competition up against the ropes because they’ll act erratically. They’ll start to lash out, or look to slip in a low blow to slow you down.
I find very few businesses are up for a fight because they feel they have too much to lose. Instead they circle one another, make it look like they’re in a fight. And they grow slow and unfit. They stop being able to recognise who the competition is or where their own weaknesses are. They become ripe for the taking. This is when industries get disrupted. Disruption happens when hungry players see an industry with 2 or 3 players who are slow, unfit and a bit tubby. Players who are no longer able to hold their own in a fight. Players who’ve been circling one another for years without punching.
Business is more like boxing and less like rock, paper, scissors. As Scott Galloway says, capitalism is full body contact violence at a corporate level. Most businesses seem to have forgotten this.