vSente campaigns via a proprietary methodology that utilizes maneuver theory to generate competitive advantage. Our methodology calibrates customer, competitor and competency in a manner that allows campaigners to shape the battle to their advantage and the disadvantage of their competition. The methodology is influenced by Sun Tzu, John Boyd and Michael Porter.
STRATEGYDetermine the most effective strategy for attacking competitor vulnerability.
TACTICSReview a comprehensive list of potential tactics to wage and win battle fro market share.
CENTER OFGRAVITY
Determine the critical vulnerabilities of an industry leader or an aggressive challenger.
Determine if there are unethical, illegal, or policy advantages deployed by your competition.
BATTLEBOTQuickly assess the potential of success for a challenger attack
95 page online manual describing the art of attack including diagrams, exhibits, links and other resources.
Losing market share?
...Are smaller more agile competitors running circles around you - poaching your best customers and eroding your market share?
Could you be gaining share?
...Do you have a large, better provisioned industry leader just begging for a smaller, more agile competitor to knock it off?
Can you gain share?
...Or is your marketing department too busy counting creative awards, doing dinner with agency pukes, and avoiding your questions like how much did that branding campaign really cost and when will it generate revenue?
My name is Mike Smock.
I'm the managing director of vSente. We help small and medium-size enterprises wage and win battles for market share. As a marketer, there are times when I feel like we work in a parallel universe. My universe is grounded by basic truths like revenue, profit and market share. Which is why when I read most of the "best practices" published by today’s marketing intelligentsia, I scratch my head and wonder what universe are they from? Do these folks ever actually sell anything?
The Problem - Unaccountable, ineffective, uncompetitive marketing campaigns.
I’m not the only one scratching my head. Trade press is full of documented cases of disgruntled CEO’S demanding accountability and a return on marketing dollars invested. Widely heralded initiatives and theories like branding, CRM, word-of-mouth, open source marketing and a plethora of internet driven gimmicks and tricks have failed to live up to their advance billing.
Many reasons have contributed to the decline in marketing effectiveness. Agencies cling to dysfunctional media models. Enterprises focus on rigid, hierarchical command and control. Chief Marketing Officers emphasize creative awards over strategic competencies. Cultural differences between sales and marketing archetypes disrupt campaigning effectiveness. Assertive instincts have been replaced with nurturing skills leading to diminishing enterprise competitiveness.
Perhaps the most curious trend has been CMO’s actively shunning traditional free enterprise objectives of maximizing enterprise profitability. Instead, they favor customer advocacy theories placing the rights of consumers and community above the profitability of the enterprise. While few enterprises have adopted these decidedly socialist tendencies the proponents of these theories have none-the-less dominated the conversation and bandwidth available to marketing practitioners and crowded out or shunned those advocating competitiveness. George Stalk of the Boston Consulting Group efforts publishing Hardball as described in Fast Company, is a good case in point.
Fundamentally there are two ways you can grow a business. You can fight for market share using existing products in established markets against known competitors, and/or, you can innovate new offerings and markets with the intention of temporarily disrupting, reducing or eliminating competition. There are many degrees and combinations of these two methods but fundamentally you either fight (existing products/markets) or innovate (new products/markets).
The Solution - Battling for share, competing to win.
Regardless of which approach an enterprise may take, at some point the need to defend and fight for market share will be necessary. While innovation may spawn a short term advantage that eliminates competition, it will not be long before competitors copy or better your advantage. vSente focuses on waging and winning battles for market share. More specifically, we look at the opportunity from the vantage point of the smaller competitor challenging a market leader with the intent to permanently dislodge the leader.
Market share battles can be a lucrative source of cash flow (and provide the resources, and generate the competitive instincts necessary to innovate sustainable advantages). The key feature of market share battles is the absence of innovation risk. The battle takes place with existing products for existing customers with an established need, trained to write checks.
How does the smaller enterprise win a market share war against larger better provisioned competitors? By applying maneuver theory - shaping and exploiting mismatched competencies faster and smarter than competing forces.
Maneuver tactics were first described by Sun Tzu in the “Art of War” more than 2000 years ago. The late Samuel B. Griffith a retired Brigadier General in the U.S. Marine Corps authored one of the best translations of the Art of War. In the introduction of his 1963 translation, Griffith introduces for the first time the key concept behind maneuver theory called “shaping”.
“The prudent commander bases his plans on his antagonist’s shape. Shape him, Sun Tzu says. Continuously concerned with observing and probing his opponent, the wise general at the same time takes every possible measure designed to prevent the enemy from shaping him”.
Maneuver theory allows a competitor to shape the conflict whether it is the battlefield or the marketplace to his advantage - and to the disadvantage of his opponent.
vSente has created and published a significant body of work describing the application of maneuver theory to marketing and advertising. This body of work is contained in an library of campaigning resources called vSente’s ARMORY - the online resource for the competitive marketer which introduces new thinking, approaches and techniques to the process of competitive marketing.
We offer subscriptions to the Armory, two-day workshops for enterprises, agencies and consultancies, and we engage with enterprises to execute campaigns.
Are you ready to start kicking ass? If so then subscribe to vSente's Armory, book a workshop or engage a campaign.
Sincerely,
Mike Smock
Managing Director
VSENTE - San Francisco
There are several ways to reach us.
You can call Mike Smock directly at 415.457.8449. David can be reached at +44 (0) 123 366 3199 in the UK.
Mike can also be reached on IM. His screen name is vsente55.
Location of the client is not important - we get inquiries from and can mobilize almost anywhere globally.
Our general e-mail address is info@vsente.com.
There are three market share metrics that when aggregated can be used to gauge the effectiveness of all marketing activities. The metrics are the volume, value and vector of your market share.
1. Volume. Market share volume is the traditional notion of share measured in dollars or units relative to your competition. While volume is a good initial indicator, marketers need to know the value of this share and the trend of their share.
2. Value. Market share value attaches a quantitative value, measured by percentage margin, to your market share volume. Having a large share of an unprofitable market is not sustainable. Alternatively, holding a smaller share that is profitable may be sustainable.
3. Vector. Market share vector is a trend measurement that depicts the direction your market share volume and value are heading, over time, relative to your primary and secondary competitors. The vector has a starting point, at least one intermediate measurement point and an ending point, typically the conclusion of a campaign, or performance review date of a CMO. Read the full post here...
The traditional sales and marketing organization is dysfunctional. Especially when executing marketing campaigns. There are three primary issues:1) focus on rigid, hierarchical command and control,
2) emphasis on creative over strategic competencies, and
3) cultural differences between sales and marketing archetypes.
These issues result in marketing campaigns that are unaccountable and ineffective. Marketing managers typically talk in terms of brand, awards, reach, frequency, impressions and clippings. Sales managers typically talk in terms of wins, share, revenue, margin and quotas. The language and culture of these two groups are as different as are their motivations and rewards which destroys unit cohesion and leads to isolation. The isolation is worsened by command and control doctrine that favors predictable, static situations driven by a centralized hierarchy.
Marketing intelligence skills are critical competencies missing from traditional sales and marketing organizations. The inability to generate actionable intelligence results in disorientation and uncoordinated efforts. Effective coordination is made possible by orientation - the process of converting intelligence into effective strategy and tactics. New doctrine driven by intelligence and designed for unpredictable, rapidly changing situations is required for truly effective marketing campaigns.
Book a workshop or subscribe to the Armory and learn how to convert your sales and marketing organization into an attack engine.
I have been on the bleeding edge of innovation many times throughout my 25+ year career. Which is why I have found the thesis of Kim & Mauborgne's Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant to be wrong. Simply wrong. As a frequent critic of Blue Ocean Strategy my primary issue is in the title premise of creating "uncontested" markets and making the competition "irrelevant".
I have made money off of innovation and lost money. My first real brush with innovation was back in 1982 when I co-founded an early artificial intelligence pioneer in partnership with a University of Illinois computer scientist. This early experience dealing with the vagaries of Carnegie Mellon AI experts and the realities of cash flow from a venture funded start-up was to later be replicated many times over. My experience taught me two things about innovation: 1) execution trumps innovation and, 2) Innovation is fleeting.
...Most ironically I learned that the best way to attract competition was through innovation.
...And I have learned that the most potent weapon in my competitive arsenal is innovation...
...but innovation is a fleeting advantage, and I have to execute like a banshee in order to develop it, launch it, extend it and better it.
Which is why I approach Blue Ocean with a healthy dose of skepticism and caution. This is how the publisher of Blue Ocean Strategy describes the premise behind the book:
Since the dawn of the industrial age, companies have engaged in head-to-head competition in search of sustained, profitable growth. They have fought for competitive advantage, battled over market share, and struggled for differentiation. Yet, these hallmarks of competitive strategy are not the way to create profitable growth in the future. In a book that challenges everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success, W. Chan Kim and Renee Aubergine argue that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool.
Business Week several weeks back had a good article on the essence of competition and some good comments on innovation and the Blue Ocean Strategy. The article concludes with an observation by Joe Kraus, founder and chief executive of Web collaboration software startup JotSpot:
"The truth is, there's no final winner in the global game of corporate competition. "All winning does is let you compete against a whole new set of better-funded competitors," ... "Competition never ends."
The last chapter of Blue Ocean Strategy is dedicated to the topic of sustaining and renewing a Blue Ocean Strategy. Authors Kim and Mauborgne compromise the main premise of their book by suggesting:
... a successful blue ocean strategy will invite competitors, thereby creating the red ocean they so virulently abhor.
Which begs the obvious question - what happened to creating uncontested markets? When confronted with competition the authors counsel abandoning the blue ocean and innovating new blue oceans. Interestingly, nowhere in the final chapter do they suggest that after going through the process and investment of innovating a blue ocean that the enterprise might stay and aggressively defend that which it created.
Granted, the above can lead to a tedious debate over the definition and timing of sustainability, uncontested and irrelevant. However I will assume that Chan and Mauborgne intended these benefits to be more than fleeting opportunities especially since many of the case studies referenced in the book involved decades of advantage gained by early and mid-20th century enterprises implementing so-called blue ocean strategies.
For the adroit competitor keeping a list of those enterprises implementing a blue ocean strategy might be a lucrative exercise. Once the blue ocean enterprise has done all of the heavy lifting necessary to create a new market, they will be an easy target to attack and dislodge. As we have indicated in other posts the main issue we have with blue ocean folks is their assertion that you can make competition irrelevant in the 21st century.
The reality of any blue ocean strategy is that unlike the 20th century when business cycled at a much slower rate, in the 21st century, any productive blue ocean will quickly fill with competitors. Competition can not be avoided. So be prepared to compete. To engage in head-to-head competition always in search of sustained, profitable growth. You have to fight for competitive advantage, battle over market share, and struggle for differentiation.
Here are some other recent blog posts we've made regarding Blue Ocean Strategy and other topics relative to competitive marketing that you may find of interest:
BLUE OCEAN: HOW TO CREATE UNCONTESTED MARKET SPACE AND MAKE THE COMPETITION IRRELEVANT
RED OR BLUE? WHAT COLOR IS YOUR MARKETING DEPARTMENT?
MORE FROM GEORGE STALK ON PLAYING HARDBALL: DOES YOUR COMPANY HAVE THE STRATEGIC BACKBONE TO DOMINATE ITS MARKET?
MORE DEBUNKING OF BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY- THIS TIME IN BUSINESS WEEK...
WAYNE POLLARD ON BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY: W. CHAN KIM AND RENEE MAUBORGNE OMISSION EQUALS FATAL FLAW
MILITARY METAPHORS: IS BUSINESS WAR?
CMO'S COMMENT ON MARKETING ACCOUNTABILITY
FIGHT OR FLEE? WHEN MARKETERS NEED TO COMPETE
MARKETING CAMPAIGNING FUNDAMENTALS: FRAMING, METRICS AND ACCOUNTABILITY
SALES AND MARKETING ORGANIZATIONS AND THE WILL TO WIN
MARKETING TECHNOLOGY: A TRADE-OFF BETWEEN OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY AND AGILITY?
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