5 Rocks of Advice For Toppling the Giant in Your Industry

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Tired of the same of business advice?

Marketing and branding expert, Stephen Denny’s new book, “Killing Giants: 10 Strategies to Topple Goliath in Your Industry” (Portfolio Penguin, April 2011) takes a unique approach to helping you take your business to the next level.

He offers BusinessNewsDaily readers five tips for stealing your competition’s lunch.

• Seize the microphone. Just because they're bigger than you doesn't mean they're saying anything. So hijack the conversation. Bob Parsons at Go Daddy was stumped as to why his company, with the best product assortment and the best pricing, only had 16 percent share of the domain name registration business. When he learned that his problem was brand awareness, he introduced himself to the entire market, becoming the first domain name registrar to advertise on the Super Bowl in 2004. Now, his company ranks number one.
• Win in the last three feet. It's a noble calling, spending other people's money - especially when it's your competitor's marketing you're hijacking. Oslo University reversed years of declining enrollment in the face of a competitor that outspent it 200 to 1 with a tightly focused guerilla PPC campaign, keying off of its competitor's well-advertised curriculum course names, reaching students in the waning moments of the school registration period. The results were a five-fold increase in admissions.

• Fight dirty. When you can't compete on spending, sometimes you can compete on mindshare. Searle Canada's successful launch of its Arthrotec painkiller for arthritis sufferers swept away the resistance and expected slow acceptance of the medical community with a $1 million grant for the discovery of a device or protocol for early diagnosis of ulceration caused by normal pain killers - a fact known to everyone, but thought to be unavoidable. Arthrotec went on to become the top prescribed arthritis drug in Canada.
• Create a culture of speed, rewarding those who embody evidence-based decision making and who thrive on winning. Intuit launches early versions of its products for intensive user feedback so that it can bring the voice of the customer - using both qualitative and quantitative metrics - to bear on its decision making. Its speed of decision making cuts no corners: they get to the right decisions faster because they come into the room with the best evidence. 
• Shed light on the inconvenient truth. Understand the power of pricing your product in a smart way. Dessert maker Kozy Shack competes with some of the largest food companies in the world, but has successfully carved out a 30 percent share in its category by careful management of its return on inventory investment, ensuring that its relatively faster inventory turnover and competitive gross margins to its retailers deliver a better financial return on every dollar its retailers invest in inventory.  It's not just about being cheaper.

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