If you are going to be in the game, you need to step up to the plate. I was recently talking to someone I know who considers himself to be a pretty good Guerrilla Marketer. My friend said that one of his competitors was beating him at his own game. We talked about some of the tactics being used by the competitor, and I have to admit they were doing a very good job utilizing some of the 100 Guerrilla Marketing weapons. We looked at how they were using fusion marketing, free content on their web site and other weapons. When we looked at what my friend was doing we realized that he wasn’t getting beaten at his own game, he was forfeiting it since he wasn’t even in it. He had so many things going on that he really wasn’t doing anything except talking about what he was going to do. He knows Guerrilla Marketing alright, but totally missed item number eight of the Guerrilla Marketing Attack: maintaining the attack. Jay Conrad Levinson has always said that the hardest part of the attack is maintaining it. If you don’t maintain and perfect your Guerrilla Marketing attack, then you take yourself out of the game completely and you will be beaten. Hockey great Wayne Gretsky said, “You miss 100% of the shots that you don’t take.”
If you think you are in the game, you need to make sure that you are playing in the right game and playing by the right rules. If your business makes a move in reaction to what competitors are doing, there is a good possibility that you just entered their game. Unless you are big enough to make up your own rules, you need to find out if you did enter their game and what the rules are. When Wal-Mart moves into an area, they make up their own rules.
Here is a good example of what I am talking about. We have a big retail area that is growing on daily basis. There are 3-4 hair salons in the area, even across the street from each other. They are competing with each other with signs, post cards and various mailers. They are actively involved in marketing to their new customers and everyone else lives in the area. An established salon decided to move into the area so they closed their shop a couple of miles away and moved. When they left, there were no signs at the old place stating that they had moved; they were just gone. They also did not let current or former customers know of the move. I know because my wife and I fit each category. So they are in the area now where there is potentially more business, but it has been driven by the marketing efforts of others where they are using special prices to get customers to come in.
So you have an established salon sitting there with higher prices, no marketing or offers to anyone, let alone existing customers, and they are waiting for business to find them. There are people in that area who are there to get their hair styled, but their buying criteria is low price. A salon that offers a style at double the price, with no discounts or coupons, isn’t going to get many of those customers, unless they can do one thing: If they can shift the buying criteria away from price and shift it to style, then they have a whole new ball game since they just changed the rules. Until they can do that, then playing in the other salon’s game won’t exactly set the “woods on fire.”
If you feel like you are getting beaten by a competitor, step back and make sure that you are really in the game. Are you playing the game are you playing at the game? Make sure that you are stepping up to the plate and swinging at the ball and not just talking about it.
Doc Pratt
