Your competitors can afford to suck at marketing. You can’t.

Dave Heywood (00:00)
are we getting too inspired by firms that can afford to be bad at marketing?

This is Scale, an OX7 Partners podcast, and I’m Dave Heywood

So let’s start off with a little bit of maths. Because we love a bit of that, don’t we? there’s some research from two blokes called Binet and Field who’ve spent decades getting under the skin of what actually makes advertising work.

And their work essentially shows that if you’re a smaller challenger

you need to proportionally shout louder.

than the larger competitor, just to grow it all.

Market leaders annoyingly have the benefit of coasting along and continuing to grow on just a fraction of that noise. You can’t yes it’s unfair, but it’s just the reality of the position that we’re in.

So if you or your teams are developing strategies that

presume that you can outmarket a competitor five times your size. Ask yourself the question are you building a plan that you’re never going to be able to budget for?

But as always, there’s stuff we can do about this. so today I’m gonna take a look at

Why copying competitors vague but confident marketing is often one of the worst things you can do at your size. And how we can approach that instead. and we’ll take a look at a real example of a firm that went up against three competitors who have the ability to outspend them. And how they won not by shouting louder, but

by refusing to play the same game.

So, shall we?

So let’s go back to those larger, more successful competitors that we look at and get all misty Id.

You know, you see them everywhere.

But when you get under the skin of their marketing, it comes down to nice video, and we’ll use words like transform and reimagine and

nowhere is it made really clear what they actually do the problem they particularly solve. It’s even harder to then find out what it actually costs. And you could be forgiven for thinking well if they can get away and do that and still post twenty percent year on year growth.

That’s gotta work for me too, right?

Unfortunately we can’t.

and there’ll be an analogy that we’re all very familiar with.

when somebody signs off and buys a market leader and it all goes tits up, no one asks why they pick the market leader.

Yeah, it’s that whole nobody got fired for buying IBM la

Which actually isn’t a particular complement to IBM, but it does say a lot about the ability of their brand to do a hell of a lot of arse covering.

So they don’t need to explain themselves clearly because they’ve spent God knows how long building that brand and association in the in the market to the point where reputation alone really does all the work. You’re just nowhere near that point yet.

but what it does come down to is that if somebody does go with you

and it goes a little bit wrong, then it’s on them far more personally, in a way that it perhaps wouldn’t be with another provider.

so it all boils down to is that every little shred of confusion along the way just gives them one more reason to say no.

So we can’t be vague like they are. They’ve earned the right to be unclear. And you haven’t. So let’s not borrow an approach that only works with a reputation that you don’t actually have yet.

So let’s be clear on exactly who you are, what you do and who you’re for.

So we all know about mental availability by now.

We want to convert the two, three, four, five percent that are in market right now, but also build future pipeline with the far, far larger cohort of people in your addressable market who aren’t ready to buy yet.

Now when we look at that say ninety five percent who aren’t directly in market at moment, it’s just really impractical to build and fund a huge brand campaign that stays in front of everyone. It’s impossible.

If we’ve got to proportionally outspend anyway, then reaching a huge volume of people who

who might only be in a position to buy in three years time. you’re gonna go bankrupt before you’ve even got through year one.

So let’s so let’s park that go after the ninety five percent purist view to one side for a moment.

And I think this is the point where

a lot of conventional advice and expertise around go to market just starts to fall apart a little bit.

I wouldn’t call it out and right wrong, it’s just not affordable.

So

so our question starts to move away from just brand and demand, but actually asking the question well what can we start funding that really works?

So let’s start to make this real a little bit.

I’d like you to picture a particularly crowded B2B category. IT services, analytics, you name it. Doesn’t doesn’t really matter. But it’s a market where every Challenger is running the exact same pitch as the two or three big dogs above them.

you know the lines. It’s all about we’ve got the best technology. We’ve got the data no one else has.

Essentially a similar bunch of words and you could jumble up all of the logos and messaging and be forgiven for not really noticing.

Take a look next time you go to an event and people are exhibiting and you will see variations on a theme as you as as you walk around. Once you see it, you can never unsee it.

Now there’s a reasonably good example of a business that didn’t do that. No

I’ll give this one a little bit of a health warning. It’s a story told by the agency who worked on it, so just let’s just bear that in mind as we as we go through go through it. It’s a version of events from their perspective rather than some rigorous research. But there was a business called EXL they’re an analytics and operations firm, and they go up against Accenture.

Genpact Cognizant, so firms absolutely dwarfing them in size and spend. everyone in that particular category competes on the same claim.

Cutting edge world class technology, essentially.

So EXL decided not to go after them on tech. they made a bit of a different claim. and they sort of wrapped it up as digital intelligence, but behind it the the real substance was about having the tech isn’t enough. You need someone who’s spent years inside your industry.

To know what to point the tech at and what not to.

So they I ended up with a bit of a shift of emphasis, having a differentiated competitive claim rather than we have better technology. Well, if I’m hiring a technology firm, I would bloody well expect that anyway, so it’s nothing really special to shout about in the first place. And

And actually the the fact that EXL were deeply specialised in fewer industries compared to the larger generalist players it was really an exercise in them playing to their strengths and not even something they’d have to they had to concoct or invent.

And they made it a little bit more than just a slogan and some competitive positioning, they built the whole visual identity around it.

But also got every single employee singing from the same hymn sheet. They built a whole partner program around the same idea and really really let it breathe internally with even their own internal award system recognizing some of that expertise.

So actually clients in the market were hearing this digital intelligence story from multiple angles to the point where actually yes it was a point of well what makes you different from from these guys but something that felt quite genuine and real as well.

So when everyone in your space is competing on those same narrow areas, look for that specific thing that’s actually true about you and no one else. And use that as the foundation to build your whole competitive positioning around.

Of course, though it all comes down to money at some point.

So what can us mere mortals with

with regular marketing budgets, actually spend some money on it’ll make a bit of difference.

Number one

So I’d say the most common thing that one can do is to build things but keep working for you after you stop paying for them. Now I know that sounds pretty obvious, right? But

An advert or some paid advertising somewhere. It stops working the second your media spend stops.

But some really deep expert content from your senior leadership team, a genuinely useful framework or tool that you can offer to the market, that can that can keep attention for years. I’ve seen some really well thought through pieces of content.

continue to deliver the goods three even four years after being published.

So if we turn our attention to those things that can compound over time, then we’ll start to build up some of that some of that real momentum.

And secondly, weave distinctiveness into everything. and distinctiveness isn’t about being loud. It’s not even about using a different colour palette to everyone else. It’s having a point of view, having something that you’re known for. It’s

It’s it’s thinking about what what makes it easy for people to think of you when they finally have that problem but only you can solve.

And there’s a bit of good news as well. LinkedIn actually did some of their own research and they suggest that once someone’s actually in market and those buying antennae are are up, they actually they often only need to see you around one to two times before they act. So actually you don’t need thousands of complicated touch points.

here there and everywhere, you just need to be really recognisable when it counts.

And finally.

Don’t don’t compete on features. Don’t even compete on benefits. Level it up here and talk about value.

Think back to that EXL example. If you find a good amount of your peers saying the same two, three things about themselves that just feel completely interchangeable.

the most cost effective thing that you can do is actually refuse to say those same three things.

And none and none of those need a huge budget attached to them. It may well be just a case of

reallocating resource or thinking time.

But they do need a bit of discipline and patience, which

can be harder for some firms to fund than throwing cash at something.

amongst all this I do want to alert you to a little bit of a trap and an easy way to spend a lot of money and get not a lot out of it.

It’s a reasonable conclusion to come to, when we talk about the fact that we don’t have the budget to target the ninety ninety-five percent of people not in market you might be tempted therefore to say, well, okay, fine, we can’t do that. Let’s just focus down on the twenty percent or so.

who are closer to buying right now using intent data and some of the tools that claim to spot some those buying signals early.

That can sometimes be a bit of a false promise. ‘Cause by the time a firm or individual shows up in some of these tools, they’ve usually done most of the homework or thinking.

on their own, with their peers, with no visible digital signals. So a good chunk of their shortlist is already decided by them.

So just be wary of chasing some of that detectable intent

‘Cause it might not get you ahead of p problem in the way that you might think.

So here’s a little bit of homework.

Take a look at your last twelve months or so marketing spend and ask yourself the question.

For anything we did or delivered there that’s still working today, with no additional spend to being allocated. So a piece of content that’s getting read more than others. A particular

A particular phrase that you used that’s still being repeated back to you by customers.

and if the answer’s nothing, then

you’ve got confirmation that what we’ve been doing so far is renting attention instead of owning it and building it and compounding it.

And once we’ve got a clear view of where we stand, we can start to do something with that.

So while budget might be the excuse a lot of people reach for, like it’s a real pressure for sure, but it’s not quite the bottleneck that that people claim it is.

Being memorable costs nothing. Being clear costs nothing. But being the same as everyone else that can be an expensive mistake.

Thanks for listening, I hope you found that useful. I’m Dave Heywood and this is Scale and OX7 Partners Podcast.