Episode 170 - Please Stop Copying Competitors’ Moves! Here’s Why.

Most high-growth consumer brands need to re-position as they scale. The niche positioning that got you into the eight figures will drive you into a ditch. In this episode, I share four advanced tips I once kept behind an online training paywall. Don’t miss this content. In fact, copy the transcript off your screen.

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Alright, I'm here this time to talk about my favorite advanced positioning tips. So this these are the sacred tips that historically I've only released to my paying clients, but you know what the hell? You could follow one and gain advantage. You could follow all of them and gain even more advantage. It's really about, you know, how hard you want to discipline your organization. Because the more of these you add, the more constraints strategically you're going to operate under. And you're putting yourself to a tougher standard. But the first advanced tip that I share with folks is you've got to stop competing in the same sandbox as the rest of your competitors. Oh my god. This is the number one thing that historically happened in the natural channel is people would come in just a wee late to the natural organic trend in their category, and as a result, engage in a sad, nitpicking, ideological, definitional fight, usually, over some sexy new attribute, and base their entire positioning essentially as a reaction to the inferior, profane, and incorrect execution of the formula in the competitor next to me, who is in fact a liar, a scumbag, and an agent of the devil, or some such moralistic nonsense that nobody really cares about outside of the natural channel and won't scale your business. So getting lost in the nitpicking battles within your category, I don't care where the nitpicking is going on, or about what, is exactly the trap that your competitor would love for you to fall into, because you won't be looking out broadly at a much larger market that you need to attract to accelerate. The second advanced positioning technique I want to talk to you about is related to the issue of looking out beyond your sandbox, which is that it maybe it's the second reason to ignore your face-off competitors, is that oh my god, you cannot be taking your positioning as a defensive meathead reaction to the moves that your immediate face-off peer is making in your category. You can't have a positioning based on reflexive reaction to what your competitor is doing. Um, this is how people literally, in a series of really dumb playbook moves, end up becoming a sad, mnemetic, half-assed version of their competitor and have lost all meaningful, distinct positioning that can be remembered as distinct, right, in the marketplace, which is really driven by how people think about you in milliseconds in their brain. This includes all four Ps of your playbook when I talk about mimicking their moves. So just because they decide to gut their pricing because they raise too much money doesn't mean you just go do that, because this has changed your positioning. You are trying to become a value player now in the category, which is what they just chose to do. You actually need to do the opposite in most cases, which is grit your teeth, remain premium, and have a positioning that can command that premium. And this is where people, you'd be surprised, people who are risky enough to put their life savings into a business can sometimes start to chicken shit out in the eight figures. Seen it, seen it, been there. So don't do that. Third advanced positioning technique. Um not, I swear to god, you cannot build your business. Intentionally or otherwise, on episodic or even worse, rare occasions. You've got to build your business and your positioning to capture usage every freaking day. That's where you want to aim at. Now you're not gonna hit everybody at a daily level, but you're gonna hit a lot. And in the process, you're going to hit an outcome, an attribute outcome signal that I talk about in my book, which is much more quotidian every day in its applicability, and that's gonna at least create a nice weekly usage pattern. Which, if that is very common in your category, and numerator panel data can tell you that, then that's exactly what you need to be doing. You cannot become a special drink. So, believe it or not, you can actually scale in some high velocity categories, you could scale as a special occasion premium trade-up option in a category that can include bread, baked goods, and even eggs. I had a client who was offering an amazing egg because they had special feed they gave the chickens. Um and at the time they launched, no one else was doing it, they were just feeding crap. But this egg company was doing something pretty cool, which I can't talk about. And the thing is that when they did their initial research way too late, I might add, because I yelled at them, they they find out, they found out that a lot of their customers were only buying them maybe once a month or less. When they had like a party or guests over, I wanted to have a little treat. Right? So, you know, it's not that that's a horrible audience. There's nothing wrong with customers like that. But when it's too much early on, when it's too much of your customer base, you have a very inefficient business and you have the potential, culturally speaking, of having your whole brand get defined by a narrow set of occasions. And it's a trap if you let it happen. This is what I call the stonewall kitchen trap. Now, they eventually scaled their business, they just spent four decades doing it. Do you want to wait that long? Then you don't want to anchor yourself to special occasions. So I'm with my friend uh Steve, and he's gonna demonstrate this advanced positioning technique as a Sawaro cactus. He well, he's been here by this trail side for 39 years, and um, he picked the spot because he's um found a cluster of rocks which hoover up the water during the monsoon. He's also near the trail, which collects the coyotes and the javelina shit, which fertilizes and feeds him. And you know, this is this is a savvy little cactus. See how the rocks gather the water, you know, so he put himself next to the trail to collect the shit that then gets watered down, and that is pretty clever, I have to admit, Steve. You nailed it. You nailed, you know. What uh Steve, my Swaro friend, is demonstrating is the advanced tip of aiming your business, positioning it such that it can receive resources from the broader culture. And this requires positioning yourself out of the store to hoover up all sorts of attention. They often call it an omni-channel playbook in marketing. So even if your marketing was really focused on one thing like YouTube or TikTok in the beginning and that worked, now you gotta you gotta work a lot harder than that. But more importantly, you need to position yourself with an audience that's gonna scale. So your initial niche, which isn't gonna take you past 50 mil in most cases, and that's if you're lucky, your initial niche has to connect behaviorally, culturally, somehow, to a much larger group, has to be nested inside that larger group. I talk about this in another video, or I talk about what Gatorade did to reposition its super intense professional athlete brand, Gatorade, to an everyday hydration business. Um, it did it by switching, by putting Michael Jordan visually on the Thursday afternoon urban basketball court, where Joe Schmoe and his buddies are playing pickup. Because that's the massive audience for Gatorade. It's not people who are in NCAA basketball. 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