Selling the Invisible: a field Guide to Modern Marketing \(Biz Books to Go\) pdfdrive com

Your real competitor often is sitting across the table. Plan accordingly.
Hit ’Em Where They Ain’t
The best strategy in war is to win without a fight.”
Sun Tzu gave that advice centuries ago, and Wal-Mart and the accounting
firm of McGladrey & Pullen have heeded this advice and prospered with
essentially identical strategies.
Sam Walton’s brilliantly profitable strategy for Wal-Mart was to go where no
sane competitor like Woolworth or Kmart would dream of: to towns that seemed
too small to support a large discount store. In 1962, Sam opened his first store in
tiny Rogers, Arkansas. Two years later, he christened his second store in
Harrison, Arkansas, population 6,000. He opened six more stores before he

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finally opened a store outside Arkansas, in little Sikeston, Missouri.
Walton claimed these towns and their surroundings for himself, and his
domination in these areas produced the profits that fed Wal-Mart’s growth into
more and bigger communities. Just thirty years after opening that first store in
Rogers, Sam Walton died. He was America’s richest man, and his company was
America’s largest retailer.
(Like many clever strategies, Walton’s may have been partly accidental.
After moving sixteen times in nineteen years with her husband, Helen Walton
wanted nothing to do with cities, and insisted that she and Sam settle in a town
with no more than 10,000 people. They chose Bentonville, Arkansas, so Helen
could be near her family and Sam could be near the best quail hunting in
America.)
This “Go where they ain’t” strategy has fueled McGladrey & Pullen, the
nation’s eighth largest accounting firm. With Big Six accounting firms
dominating America’s largest cities, McGladrey focused its strategy on being the
only national accounting firm in much smaller cities: Des Moines, Cedar Rapids,
Greensboro, Madison, Pasadena, Richmond, and Cheyenne, for example. In each
of these cities, McGladrey is positioned as the brand-name accounting firm in
the area—a powerful position.
The advice “Go where they ain’t” is not limited to location. A Pasadena,
California, attorney goes where they ain’t by marketing himself as a motorcycle
accident specialist, leaving other personal injury attorneys to fight for the much
larger and far more competitive market of automobile accident victims. Several
large advertising agencies avoid competition for the large and ruthlessly
competitive consumer products market by specializing in agricultural accounts.
Fingerhut went where they ain’t by focusing its catalog products exclusively on
people with so little disposable income and such ugly credit that no other catalog
company thought there could be a market there.
Again, the problem with “competitive strategy” is that it encourages you to
frame your market in traditional, competitive terms. This frame anchors you to
the same structure, system, and markets as your competitors, when the better
strategy is to heed the advice of Sun Tzu, Sam Walton, and the bean counters at
McGladrey & Pullen: Win without a fight.