you're not in your market. you're in theirs.
Brought to you by The Art Of Positioning Podcast
"We can't outmarket the giants."
I wrote it down, because it was the third or fourth time that week I'd heard some version of it, and something about how flat it came out got under my skin.
Everything they've won came through relationships. And yeah, that's worked for years, and it's still working. It's also keeping them limited.
Their next thought was that the only option then was guerrilla marketing.
Get scrappier, louder. Get into the corners the big firms can't be bothered with.
And I nodded. Because... fair?
Except while looking at their business, it seemed like they had coverage everywhere across several verticals. And someone brought in specifically to sell, now working on ALL of these verticals.
Yeah. That's a whole war game where one side just has one player.
Look, I mean, I get it. Nobody sits in a room and decides to spread themselves thin, ya know? It came from good intention. They've done the work in each of these corners, so covering each of these bases looked like a good call. A responsible one. You don't lose anything.
But the thing was the sentence itself.
We can't outmarket the giants.
Because in that is a decision that wasn't made consciously. That the giants set the terms. That there's a race on, and it's their race, and the only question left is how hard you're willing to run it.
I can relate hard to this, because last year I felt like I was in the same situation.
Monday, I had to get on content. And based on all the advice out there, make sure it's high value. Had to hit all the things you needed to hit. Specific formats. Maybe specific timing. And yeah, I followed them at that time, and I got proper good at it.
Then my apartment got robbed, and I got sick back to back. And my whole machine just stopped.
Nothing like being forced to sit still to show you what you've been running from.
And two things showed up in that gap.
The content on its own was never the thing carrying my business. Yeah, cool, it was doing something, but it wasn't doing that.
And the harder I worked on the process, the more of my own spark went missing from it. I got so busy doing it properly that I'd stopped doing it like Badassery, like the brand. Which, for a business built on being unmistakable, is pretty embarrassing to catch yourself at.
Then the second one, and I keep having to look back to this one.
There is always going to be a best practice. That recommendation, tactic, framework, someone with a claim that this is the thing that fixes your problem.
But if any of it worked the way it's sold, you'd be able to point at five identical companies winning in the same industry right now.
Yeah. I can't name them. I don't know about you.
So what we're sold is a lie. The best practices, the tactics, the shoulds, all of that. It's a smokescreen that the top players keep up so the rest of us, well, we stay exactly where we are. Running their race, in their lane, comparing our splits to theirs.
So I went looking for people who got out of that lane. The businesses that approach things differently. And not the overdone to *uck ones either.👇
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Most businesses are built around one kind of brain.
Usually yours as the founder, and then wonder why their top performers burn out, go silent, or check out while still technically doing their job.
In this episode, we get into what happens when neurodivergent minds hit systems that were never built with them in mind, and what it takes to build a business that works for the humans inside it.
I’m joined by Alexis Frank MBA, creator of Governance by Design, and Mark Sones, autistic ADHD leader turned neurodiversity consultant, to break down how hiring, leadership and processes change when you stop pretending everyone thinks the same.
"Built Around One Brain: Team Burn Out" is out now on this The Art of Positioning Podcast episode - listen here.
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The giants owned the airport, so he just... didn't go to the airport
1957 - Jack Taylor is working as a car salesman in Saint Louis, and he starts a rental business out of the basement of the dealership.
Car rental at that point usually meant two things. Hertz or Avis. And it was at a counter in an airport, marketed to the business traveler with an expense account as they were walking off the plane.
That was the market. That was the customer. And both of those companies already had every counter that mattered.
It felt like there was no other option.
He was never winning that, and certainly not from a basement. So he just didn't go for that fight.
He opened in the neighborhoods instead. And went after someone the airport lot weren't even thinking about. The person whose car is in the shop.
Think about it. That person had a rubbish week, and they need a car for nine days. They can't get to the airport to rent one because the entire reason they need a car is that they haven't got a car.
Now for the proper clever part.
These people went and built relationships with insurance adjusters. So when a claim came in, the adjuster could hand the customer a rental instead of a cheque.
And so it brought him forward as the answer. At that exact moment the question gets asked, by the person who's doing the asking.
Try buying that with an ad budget.
Enterprise's own heritage page says they steadily transformed the industry by developing a market segment that grew to be as large or larger than the airport-based rental market.
As large or larger. He never took a thing off Hertz. He built a market next door that turned out to be the same size, and they didn't even clock it until it was done.
He had no credentials, so he stopped selling credentials
1963 - A bloke called Bruce Henderson sets up a consulting outfit inside a Boston bank. One employee. Him.
His competition? Arthur D. Little, going since 1886. And McKinsey, going since 1926, who by then had spent decades building a reputation as the safest pair of hands a board could hire.
Both selling the same thing as each other. Access, pedigree, and a name nobody gets fired for picking.
Henderson had none of it. Playing that game just meant losing it.
So in 1964 he started posting essays to strangers.
One page. Small enough to sit in a jacket pocket. Sent to a closed list of senior executives who'd never heard of him and hadn't asked for it. He called them "a punch between the eyes."
And I want to be clear here, because this usually gets misread as "so, publish more." Nah. What he did was stop selling the thing the giants were selling, and go and invent something they didn't have. Corporate strategy, as an actual discipline. Then he went and found the people who wanted it, before any of them knew there was a name for it.
The Experience Curve came out of that thinking. So did the Growth-Share Matrix. Both are still taught.
When he died in 1992, the Financial Times reckoned "few people have had as much impact on international business in the second half of the 20th century."
The guy never beat McKinsey. I mean, McKinsey... and you know what? He never even tried.
🏏 The question... worth questioning
The question your business is answering right now, whether anyone chose it or not, is this one:
How do we get in front of more of the people the big firms are already in front of?
The thing is, that might be the wrong question entirely.
What if you don't want their buyer?
No, seriously. What if the people the giants are courting are the people you shouldn't spend a cent on? Because by the time they're searching for answers, there are already three big names in the room and you're the fourth quote on the pile.
There's a different point in that journey. Earlier, most of the time, but it could also be a quirk.
Perhaps there's a market sitting right next to the one everyone's scrapping over that nobody has looked at, because everybody's looking at the same one. Taylor's was people without a car. Yours is somewhere.
Or perhaps there's the version where you're the answer to something your competitors haven't framed as a problem yet, which is what Henderson did.
That's the creative bit. And I mean creative in the actual sense, not the make-it-pretty sense. Looking at your own market from a perspective that isn't yours and isn't your competitors' either.
Check out your last ten or so conversations. Not just the ones that won. But see who they were comparing you with.
And if it's the same names over and over, you're standing in their market, getting measured against their thing, by people who probably call them first.
What this costs while you leave it
You spend a marketing budget on a race with a finish line you can't reach. Wasted where the ceiling was set before the money went out.
Your best people get handed the whole pitch to cover. Then they don't hit the number, and everyone wonders whether the hire was the problem.
Every deal comes down to price or trust, and the giants have more of both. So you discount, or you lose. Either one a losing game.
Your team stops believing the direction is real, because it keeps changing shape while the results don't. And you feel it in who resigns a year later.
And the whole time, the room nobody's competing for is sitting there empty. Every quarter you stay in their lane is a quarter somebody else takes the thing you could have had.
Where this lands
He wasn't wrong, by the way. He can't outmarket the giants. Nobody at that size can, and pretending otherwise would be the actual bullshit answer.
But the thing that *ucked with me was that he took a true sentence and let it decide what he was allowed.
So I'd ask you. Who did you decide to be for, and when did you decide it?
If it was looking sideways at whoever is already in the industry and assuming they've worked it out, there's likely a chance your business direction has been set by somebody else's business.
And unlike the giants, that's a thing you can actually change without it taking years off your progress.
🦘 B
