THIS IS often called a “white space strategy.” You look at your market and you identify a product or service that no one is offering that would fit neatly in the white space between what currently exists and what you can bring to the market.
When Domino’s Pizza began, there were thousands of pizzerias offering the standard menu of pizza dishes, including in the same market area where the first Domino’s Pizza was established.
The white space that the founder of Domino’s, Tom Monaghan, identified was that when customers ordered pizza, speed was more important than quality. When a customer phoned in a pizza order, he was already hungry and wanting to eat as soon as possible. Monaghan filled this white space by offering pizza delivery within thirty minutes, and then restructured the entire process of producing pizzas to enable his company to hit that goal.
The rest is history. Today there are more than 8,000 Domino’s Pizza restaurants around the world, and Tom Monaghan has long since comfortably retired with a fortune of almost $2 billion. This is not a bad result for identifying a white space that was clear and obvious to everyone, but which all competitors ignored except for Domino’s.
Look for ways to introduce a new product or service combination into an existing marketplace where nobody is offering that particular product or service. Do something different and unexpected in the marketplace. You can create an imitation product and do your competitors one better. By practicing creative imitation, you take what your competitors are doing and improve on it in order to leap ahead in market perception.
Another example of hitting ’em where they ain’t was when a toothpaste company in a crowded market added an antiplaque formula and almost overnight relegated standard toothpastes to a second-rate status.
Very soon afterward, Colgate introduced a whitening formula in its toothpaste that no one else was offering, and also quickly relegated many of its competitors to second-rate status.
Just imagine! You go to the store to buy toothpaste for yourself and your family and you have a choice between standard toothpaste, antiplaque toothpaste, or a toothpaste with a whitening formula. Which one would you choose? And very quickly thereafter, another company came out with a toothpaste that had both an antiplaque formula and a whitening formula, and the race was on once more.
You can also hit ’em where they ain’t by perfecting and repositioning your product. For many years, the soft drink 7Up struggled in competition against Coke and Pepsi. The soft drink maker then shifted strategy completely and positioned 7Up as the “uncola.”
Instead of competing against Coke and Pepsi, the maker emphasized that 7Up was a light, citrus, tangy drink as opposed to a dark-colored cola.
By repositioning in this way, they were able to increase their market share from 14 percent of the soft drink market to 20 percent in just a few years, representing hundreds of millions of dollars of increased sales and profitability.
Another famous slogan based on repositioning was the Avis car rental ad that said, in comparison with Hertz, the world giant, “We’re second; we try harder.”
This message connected with potential customers who not only wanted to give the underdog a chance, but who recognized that if Avis “tried harder” the customer would probably get a better deal. Avis’s sales grew and grew, eventually making the company number two in the rental car marketplace, even though it had never been number two in its history.
Another way you can hit ’em where they ain’t is by adding something new and different to your product to make it entirely different from the existing product, thereby differentiating it from your competitors. You could add an accessory or an additional service that increases the value and attractiveness of what you offer and changes customer perceptions of your company.
When Apple introduced the iPhone, it also did something completely revolutionary. In contrast to the long-held profit strategy of Apple, which was to keep all technology proprietary and in-house, it threw open its architecture to allow people to develop applications for the iPhone. Within a few months, the dam broke. Today there are more than 800,000 applications available for an iPhone, more than for any other smartphone on the market, and many of the application developers have become multimillionaires and even billionaires.
Today, there are more than one million entrepreneurs working alone or together to develop the next new “killer app” for the iPhone as well as Android phones, all hoping to fill a “white space” with a new service that will generate tremendous market usage and potentially a new entrepreneurial fortune.