Page 34 - Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing - PDFDrive.com

despite the models in marketing planning books, is not a true competitive
market. With a few exceptions, companies are not battling to share that market.
They are battling to create it: to get prospects to want and use their service—
instead of doing nothing or performing the service themselves.

One of a million similar examples: A large food manufacturer is considering
using industrial psychologists to help in hiring. The manufacturer’s V.P. of
personnel is not simply trying to decide whether to use Firm A, B, or C. The
prospect is trying to decide whether to use any service at all!

In many cases and in many markets—among real estate consultants, extended
warranty providers, public relations firms, telemarketers, collection agencies,
interior decorators, fast-food restaurants, income tax services, motivational
speakers, and millions more— your prospect faces three options: using your
service, doing it themselves, or not doing it at all.

In many cases, then, your biggest competitors are not your competitors. They
are your prospects.

This means that your strategy—never mind all the textbooks—cannot be
competitive. If you compete aggressively, and implicitly criticize your
competitors, you aggravate your worst problem: the prospect’s doubt that anyone
in your industry can provide the service and value that the prospect needs.

If you expressly or implicitly question the prospect’s option of doing it
herself, you criticize the prospect and her judgment. That may be an accurate
analysis, but it is bullet-through-your-own-foot sales and marketing.

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
finally opened a store outside Arkansas, in little Sikeston, Missouri.

Walton claimed these towns and their surroundings for himself, and his