The last fifteen years or so have brought increasing interest in avoiding the evils of direct competition, and the runaway price wars that usually accompany it. As the global economy shifts, buckles and rocks with changing demand pressures, no one can afford to race to the bottom anymore.
Different business analysts have approached the problem from different directions. Kim and Mauborgne’s book Blue Ocean Strategy went after the challenge from a technical market analysis perspective, demonstrating a system for breaking down fundamental market drivers and using them to identify undiscovered customer demands. Other experts went after the problem from a design angle – for lack of a better name, the Apple Path – and argue that the best way to break free of market pressure is simply to make great products and let the market sort itself out. Still others, pointing to the growing advent of service-oriented companies, talk up relational “integrity selling” as the best way to keep the inside track in difficult sales environments.
They all have their valid points, but no one strategy has ever seemed to provide the end-all, be-all answer to the big question: how do you achieve high competitiveness in a market dominated by other players?
No one claims that it’s an easy nut to crack. Don’t feel bad if you haven’t managed it yet – not many have, and the ones who seem to have solved the problem also all seem to disagree on the solution. Some days, it’s like the story of the blind men and the elephant, where each has a grip on a small part of the whole, and no one has sight of the bigger picture.
What we at Load Bearing Creative have seen in recent years, however, are increasing opportunities found in uncovering strategic overlaps. As today’s typical growing company is busy expanding in a hundred directions at once, all too often that expansion takes the form of a forest of individual specializations and departments that never talk to each other. Each is too busy selling their own core competence to step back and clearly see how their particular field overlaps into other service areas of the company. And, as a result, they miss out on major business opportunities that exist in the gaps left behind by their competitors – and in the fortuitous overlaps created by unrealized compatible specialties. And this happens a lot.
For example, let’s say that your business does automation engineering. Department A focuses entirely on OEM sales of your latest line of PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers). Department B, meanwhile, specializes in hardened Industrial Ethernet solutions, which often serve as replacements for PLCs in automation system solutions. Department A is busy doing its thing, and Department B is busy doing its thing, and in your company it turns out that they rarely if ever talk to each other.
If you have the ability to step back and see where the two overlap, either doing the same job or each avoiding the same uncharted service areas, some real opportunities can pop up. And the sooner you identify them, the sooner you can get there before your competition does.
This is where proactive marketing can really help. Your marcomm department shouldn’t simply be a production house, waiting for and managing marketing needs as they happen to arise in Departments A and B. As professional communicators, they can be empowered to find effective ways for those groups to talk to each other, as well as to customers. Armed with real technical knowledge, your marketing providers can accurately identify the overlap opportunities that may right now be doing unnoticed.
In fact, you should expect it. Effective marketing, especially in technology services, requires smart intelligence gathering and the ability to synthesize powerful messages. It’s only a small skip from sharp communication to powerful service strategy.
Are you looking for a reliable way to unlock new markets, discover unseen market demands and develop strategies for dominating them? Take another good look at your marketing team. Tasked to be proactive strategic partners, they may offer greater bottom line advantages than you ever before imagined.
