Boxing The Air

Competition for its own sake is a bad idea.

“So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air.” - 1 Corinthians 9:26

In the early 1970s, Braniff Airlines was charging $62 to transport coach passengers from Dallas to San Antonio, while Southwest Airlines charged a meager $15 for the same route.

One of Southwest’s shareholders approached CEO Herb Kelleher and asked, “Don’t you think we could raise our prices just two or three dollars?”

To which Herb replied, “You don’t understand. We’re not competing with other airlines; we’re competing with ground transportation.” 

In his 1984 book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini uses the term “click, whirr” to describe the automatic, conditioned responses we have to certain situations.

Our brains don’t analyze every situation equally. We usually pay attention up to the point we feel that we have enough information to roll the tape in our heads (hence, “click, whirr”) that tells us how to react.

Nowhere is this more true in business than in the discipline of marketing.

Most leaders unconsciously assume a lens which says that “marketing is a fight for existing market share with a better product and a better brand.”

The issue with that mindset is that, on average, the category leader dominates, capturing a staggering 76% of the market's economic value within its category. That leaves everyone else fighting over the remaining 24%.

So when the marketer shows up with a better product and a better brand ready to compete for existing demand, what he is really saying is, “Our strategic plan as an organization is to compete in someone else’s market category, with an agenda they set, and we know the best we can do is fight for our share of the remaining 24% of the market that the leader has not taken.”

And that is the reason that most marketing fails.