Competition Derangement Syndrome: The Silent Killer of AgTech Innovation

The real threat to your company isn’t the competition—it’s your response to it.

“Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.”

— Peter Drucker

In 1907, the Van Camp Packing Company had a pork and beans problem.

They had been the first to can pork and beans in tomato sauce back in 1894, but over the years, competitors like Franco-American, H.J. Heinz, and the Joseph Campbell Soup Company had entered the market with similar products.

Now, the industry was in a race to the bottom.

“Buy our brand!” each company shouted.

But their appeals were indistinguishable.

With no real differentiation, the entire category was struggling…barely limping along.

At its core, this wasn’t just a business problem—it was a chronic disease.

It’s called Competition Derangement Syndrome (CDS).

For the past hundred years, it quietly plagued companies, driving them to chase rivals instead of customers. The symptoms were everywhere. (But it wasn’t until 2024 that the Category Pirates finally gave it a name.)

Back in Indianapolis, the Van Camp team knew they were sick—but they couldn’t find a cure.

Desperate for a solution, they brought in an outside consultant.

What the consultant uncovered was shocking: 94% of families were baking their own beans. They had no interest in commercially baked beans. Every company in the category was fighting over the same 6% of the population.

Instead of battling for that same tiny slice of the market, the consultant argued that Van Camp needed a different approach—one that didn’t just compete, but expanded the entire category.

That’s exactly what they set out to do.

Instead of playing the same game as their competitors, Van Camp launched a bold campaign to change consumer behavior entirely.

They set out to educate the public on the downsides of home baking.

What made this ad (and the broader campaign) so powerful?:

• Challenged home baking – They launched a campaign arguing against baking beans at home.

• Offered samples – They provided free samples of their factory-baked beans to demonstrate the difference.

• Highlighted the time commitment – They emphasized that home-baked beans required a grueling 16 hours to prepare.

• Explained digestibility issues – They educated consumers on why home baking could never make beans as digestible as their process could.

• Showed home-baked bean flaws – They illustrated how home-baked beans ended up unevenly cooked, with crispy beans on top and mushy ones below.

• Emphasized quality control – They detailed their careful bean selection process.

• Promoted their superior cooking method – They highlighted their use of soft water and steam ovens, where beans were baked for hours at 245 degrees for perfect consistency.

• Encouraged taste tests – They invited customers to compare by offering free samples.

With this campaign, Van Camp didn’t just steal market share—it made the market bigger. And as a result, they became the category leader for years to come.

Here’s an excerpt of an ad they actually ran in 1907:

This is one of the advertisements run by Van Camp using the advice of their consultant, Claude Hopkins.

Competition Derangement Syndrome causes smart leaders to make decisions in reflexive response to the competition—rather than in deliberate service to the customer.

They stop looking for unique insights. They stop thinking innovatively.

Instead, they slip into reactive mode: What’s the competition doing? We need to beat them. We need a killer strategy, feature, product, or campaign that finally crushes them. 

Every move becomes a counterpunch…a response to what someone else has already done.

The problem with this isn’t just the massive amount of waste in campaigns designed to shout louder or the bloody race to the bottom characterized by constant price slashing; it is the missed opportunity for genuine innovation. When companies fall into the CDS cycle, they’re not just risking a dip in revenue or a slip in market share…they’re putting their entire future on the chopping block.

And sometimes, it’s not just their future they sacrifice. It’s the future of the entire category.

Southwest Airlines, the most profitable U.S. airline in history, could have competed with United and American. If they had suffered from CDS, they could have decided that they needed to:

• Fly a hub and spoke model, not point-to-point.

• Fly out of DFW, not Love Field.

• Fly various aircraft, not just the 737.

• Serve full meals on flights, not just snacks for short distances.

• Book flights through travel agents instead of going direct.

• Priced themselves just below the incumbents.

They would have been telling the world:

• We’re a better airline.

• We’re the next generation of aviation (agriculture 4.0, anyone?)

By operating outside of the incumbent’s value networks and communicating a true strategy for winning—by being different, not just better—Southwest became the only airline in history to post 47 consecutive years of profit until the COVID-19 pandemic.

If you're experiencing these symptoms, you might be suffering from Competition Derangement Syndrome:

• You’ve bookmarked your competitor’s website, and you check it before every sales or marketing conversation.

• You treat “strategy” sessions as benchmarking marathons, chasing best practices instead of bold moves.

• You feel an urgent need to react—slashing prices or fast-tracking features—every time a competitor makes a move.

• You’re convinced the path to victory is a longer feature list, so you keep stuffing your decks to one-up the competition.

• You wake up at 2 a.m. in a cold sweat, wondering, “What’s our real competitive differentiation?”

• You’re stuck in an endless loop of meetings and summits trying to nail down your “positioning.”

• You’re caught in a cycle of copying the competition and chasing their every move, which you creatively call “strategic planning.”

Most companies treat CDS) like a law of nature. As soon as a competitor shows up, they panic. They slash prices. They copy features. They play the same tired game with a slightly different logo.

And in the process?

They train their customers to believe the dumbest possible lie:
All products are the same and the only thing that matters… is price.

It's not strategy. It’s surrender.

(Don’t believe me? Go take a look at the seed market)

Category design is the antidote.

Instead of reacting, you reframe.

Instead of playing their game, you name your own.

You stop shouting, “We’re better!” and start showing, “We’re different—and here’s why it matters.”

Many years ago, a British shoe company sent two salesmen to Africa to assess market potential.

The first said, “No one wears shoes—no opportunity.”
The second said, “No one wears shoes—massive opportunity.”

Most marketers still think like the first salesman.
It chases existing demand and fights for a slice of it.

• That’s why 82% of online ads are ignored.

• That’s why 21 cents of every media dollar is wasted.

But the best companies don’t chase demand. They create it—by marketing the problem they solve.

Einstein put it best:

“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five on solutions.”

Today, most companies feel pressure to perform.

So they jump into a market, chasing whoever’s already there—bludgeoning prospects with facts and feature lists:

• “We’re 5x faster!”

• “Best in class!”

• “They give you five readings per hour—we give you 60!”

• “Please pick us!”

But yelling louder isn’t the same as standing out.

Category design doesn’t help you win the race to the bottom. It helps you build a market where you’re the only one running.

The real danger of CDS isn’t just price wars. It’s what it does to your marketing—and your revenue.

When companies fall into the CDS trap, their marketing shifts from bold to bland. From creating demand to chasing it. From building value to begging for attention.

Here’s what that looks like—and why it’s dangerous:

• Your marketing stops creating demand and only captures existing demand.
  You’re the first shoe salesman, not the second. You look at the market and say, “No one’s buying—there’s no opportunity,” instead of “No one’s buying—it’s time to create something new.”

• You fail to create a “ratchet effect.”
  Great marketing changes how customers see the world. Like a ratchet, it tightens and never loosens. But CDS-driven marketing just compares. Faster. Better. Stronger. It's all "-er" with no "why."

• You neglect to define the problem, design the solution, or develop a new category.
  You keep selling features while ignoring the deeper opportunity to reframe the problem entirely. You reinforce category weaknesses instead of creating something new. You hurt not just your brand—but the category itself.

• You stop inspiring action.
  Your marketing becomes passive. Informational. Bland. It doesn’t challenge the status quo or give customers a reason to switch. It sells products. But it doesn’t sell change.

• You speak your competitor’s language.
  You borrow their positioning, their terms, their frameworks. You market in a dialect that wasn’t designed for you or your customers. And in doing so, you sound like everyone else.

• You aim your message at the wrong person.
  CDS makes you market to blockers, not decision-makers. You waste your best arguments on people who can only say “no” instead of those who can say “yes.”

• You don’t scare your competitors—you comfort them.
  You run campaigns they’re happy to see. You reinforce their worldview. You strengthen their grip. Great marketing, on the other hand? It causes emergency meetings in someone else’s boardroom.

• You disconnect marketing from revenue.
  You start calling your marketing “branding” and everything else “demand gen” like they’re separate things. But true marketing drives value today, tomorrow, and for years to come. Otherwise, it’s just arts and crafts.

• You fail to inspire your own people.
  Your marketing doesn’t just miss in the market—it falls flat in your all-hands. It doesn’t rally your team. It doesn’t give them language, belief, or pride in the movement they’re part of. And that costs you more than clicks. It costs you commitment.

If you’re showing signs of CDS, you’re not alone.

This isn’t a rare condition—it’s a pandemic in modern agribusiness.

You’ll know CDS is at work by the decisions teams start making:

• Finance prioritizes benchmarking over bold bets and turns budgets into a zero-sum game.

• HR builds its talent strategy around stealing from Bayer, Deere, Corteva, and the other majors. (Seriously, how many ex-Climate folks do we need running agtech startups?)

• The product team keeps chasing feature parity instead of product leadership.

• Marketing obsesses over tearing down the competition instead of setting the agenda.

• Product Marketing builds battle cards and comparison tables instead of narratives that create belief.

• Sales pulls numbers from a competitor’s brochure instead of a value story.

• Your leadership team walks the trade show floor, taking notes on competitors instead of shaping the future.

Escaping the grip of CDS takes work.

I’m not going to lie to you; reading one article won’t fix it. Not even this article.

• There’s no checklist.

• No quick framework.

• No growth hack.

CDS isn’t just a marketing problem—it’s not even a strategy problem. It’s deeper than that—it’s an identity problem.

Most companies don’t suffer from a lack of creativity. They suffer from a lack of clarity.

Clarity about who they are, what they stand for, and the unique problem they were built to solve.

Curing CDS starts by getting your house in order. And that starts by asking some hard questions.

And being brutally honest about the answers.

The ancient temple of Apollo at Delphi is said to have featured three famous inscriptions:

1. “Know thyself.”

2. “Nothing in excess.”

3. “Give a pledge and trouble is at hand.”

It turns out, they weren’t just timeless principles for life.
They’re also a pretty good diagnostic for businesses stuck in reactive mode.

Let’s apply them:

“Know thyself.”

Start with clarity.

• Where are we today?
  What is our current reality? What’s working, what’s not, and what are we pretending not to see?

• Where do we want to go?
  What future are we building toward? What does success look like—not just in revenue, but in impact?

• How do we plan to get there?
  What’s the strategy, the motion, the message that will carry us from here to there?

Until you answer these with honesty and courage, you’ll keep reacting instead of leading.

“Nothing in excess.”

Focus is a feature, not a bug.

• What problem do we solve?
  Not ten problems. Not every problem your customer might have. The problem. The one you were built to solve better than anyone else.

• Who is it for?
  Not every grower. Not every buyer. Who are the right-fit customers—the ones who will get it, use it, and spread it?

• What are we going to call the category? How big might it be?
  This isn’t about jamming yourself into someone else’s industry map.
  It’s about defining a new space—and claiming it.

“Give a pledge and trouble is at hand.”

Beware the promises you make—especially to yourself.

• Why do people really buy from us?
  Strip away the internal hype. Ask your customers. Listen. Then look for the overlap between their reality and your ambition.

• What do they need to hear right now to move forward?
  What’s the one idea, belief, or insight that can create momentum today—not just in theory, but in our actual funnel?

False promises—internally or externally—create chaos.

Clarity creates confidence. And confidence creates growth.

This is how you begin to escape the grip of CDS.

Not by copying others. Not by chasing trends. But by committing to truth with courage.

If clarity is the foundation, courage is the accelerant.

The investor Howard Marks, founder of Oaktree Capital, describes great investing with a simple matrix.

You can be right or wrong, and you can be consensus or non-consensus.

Obviously, if you're wrong—whether consensus or not—you lose. But what most people miss is that if you're right and consensus, you still don’t win big. Why?

Because the opportunity has already been priced in. The upside is gone. The returns are arbitraged away.

The only way to earn outsized returns is to be both right and non-consensus.

And that’s not just true in investing. It’s true in agtech. It’s true in marketing. And it’s true in category design.

To break free from CDS and build something that truly lasts, you need more than analysis and insight. You need guts.

Rick Bennett, the marketing genius behind the early advertising at Oracle and Salesforce says:

“Don’t say anything that one of your competitors would say.”

Too often, companies in our industry play it safe. They fall into language that could’ve been written by anyone—for anyone.

They fear standing out more than they fear blending in.

They ask:

• “What if someone doesn’t like it?”

• “What if we make someone mad?”

But here’s the truth:

If your message can’t offend anyone, it probably inspires no one.

Instead of sharing a real point of view, most brands play in the middle. They create commodity content. They chase consensus.

But the market doesn’t need more safe takes. It needs leaders willing to say something real—even and especially if it means not everyone will agree.

Because when you take a stand:

• People will tell you you're wrong.

• People might get mad.

• Some will tell you to stop talking.

…and sometimes, they might be right.

But other times, it just means that what you’re building isn’t for them.

And that’s okay. Because building something that isn’t for everyone is exactly how you build something that matters.

Courage doesn’t mean shouting others down. It doesn’t mean ignoring valid feedback.

But it also doesn’t mean sanding off your edges or blending into the background.

Because every breakthrough idea—the ones that redefine markets, categories, and expectations—starts as a “stupid idea” that most people laugh at.

Until suddenly, it becomes…just the way we do things.

So, stop copying. Stop chasing consensus. Stop waiting for permission.

Say something that matters. And then build the company that proves it.

The future doesn’t belong to the loudest voice in the room—it belongs to the clearest one with the courage to speak first.