Page 35 - Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing - PDFDrive.com

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.

Go where others aren’t.

The Adapter’s Edge

Drive-in restaurants once contented themselves with waitresses on roller skates,
hamburgers that oozed grease, and milk shakes that could hold a spoon stiff for
minutes. Then McDonald’s came along with technology that upended the