The Underdo Your Competition Strategy
Win by deliberately doing less than competitors, not more
Conventional wisdom says to beat your competitors, you need to one-up them. If they have four features, you need five. If they spend twenty thousand, you spend thirty. This arms race mentality is a dead end. It costs enormous amounts of money and time, it forces you to be perpetually defensive, and you wind up offering your competitor's product with a different coat of paint.
The counterintuitive alternative is to deliberately do less. Solve the simple problems and leave the hairy, complicated ones to the competition. Instead of one-upping, try one-downing. Instead of outdoing, try underdoing. This is not about being lazy; it is about being strategic in what you choose not to do.
The strategy also requires you to stop paying attention to competitors obsessively. Worrying about competition leads to reactive thinking, diluted vision, and the death of originality. You cannot out-Apple Apple because they are defining the rules. You need to redefine the rules entirely. Focus on yourself: what is going on inside your company is infinitely more important than what is going on outside it.
Finally, you must inject what is unique about you into your product. Your personal beliefs, your way of thinking, your specific take on the world. This is the one thing competitors can never copy. Zappos sells the same sneakers as every other retailer, but CEO Tony Hsieh's obsession with customer service made the company impossible to replicate.
- One-upping is a dead end that forces you into a never-ending, expensive arms race
- Solve the simple problems; leave the nasty ones for the competition
- Copying skips understanding; without understanding, you cannot grow
- Inject yourself into your product so competitors cannot replicate the you in what you sell
- Stop obsessing over competitors; focus on yourself instead
- If you are building the next iPod killer, you are already dead because you are playing by someone else's rules
- Map your competitor's complexityList every feature, option, and complexity your competitors offer. This is not for imitation; it is to identify what you can deliberately exclude. Look for the features that create confusion, require documentation, or serve only power users.
- Identify what you will NOT doExplicitly decide which problems you will leave to competitors. Write down the features you refuse to build and the customer segments you will not serve. Be proud of these omissions. Highlight them in your marketing.
- Decommoditize through personal investmentPour your unique perspective, beliefs, and way of thinking into the product. This means taking stands, having opinions, and being willing to lose customers who disagree. Competitors can copy features but they cannot copy you.
- Pick a fight to define your positionIdentify an enemy, whether a specific competitor or an entire industry approach, and position yourself as the antidote. Dunkin' Donuts mocked Starbucks. Audi took on old luxury. 7UP called itself the Uncola. Conflict creates attention and attracts passionate supporters.
- Stop monitoring competitorsOnce your position is defined, stop watching what competitors do day to day. Focus on making your own product better according to your own vision. Obsessing over competitors turns you reactive instead of visionary.
For years, major bicycle brands competed on high-tech features: suspension systems, disc brakes, titanium frames, and twenty-one-speed gear systems. Then fixed-gear bicycles, with just one gear and sometimes no brakes, exploded in popularity by going in the opposite direction.
A pair of sneakers from Zappos is identical to one from any other retailer. The product itself is a commodity. But CEO Tony Hsieh injected his personal obsession with customer service into everything: unscripted support calls, call center co-located with headquarters, every employee starting with four weeks answering phones and working in the warehouse.
Fried and Hansson experienced the competitive pressure firsthand: their products consistently did less than alternatives, and critics attacked them for it. But they discovered that customers chose their products precisely because they did less. The simplicity was not a weakness to apologize for; it was the primary selling point. They saw this pattern validated across industries, from the Flip camcorder to fixed-gear bicycles to ING Direct.