Don’t Forget About Competitive Advantage
I’ve spent a fair amount of time this past year talking about “focus of effort;” putting the bulk of your resources behind your main bid for success. While it isn’t a done deal yet, it looks like my focus of effort will move from marketing back to IT project management. Time will tell how “On Strategy” can support my new Main Effort, but in this article I’m visiting a fairly basic marketing concept: Competitive Advantage.
In a nutshell, Kotler describes “competitive advantage” as “a company’s ability to perform in one or more ways that cannot or will not match.”1 A caveat I’ll add is that your differentiating point needs to be something that is valuable to your customers.
My MBA hasn’t seemed to be a sufficient differentiator because plenty of other people have MBAs. And it seems the marketing community is placing more value on years of experience than on education. On the other hand, my military background hasn’t been a source of competitive advantage in Portland Oregon, I assume because prospects don’t see how military experience benefits their business.
This leaves a couple possible solutions: abandon military background as a differentiator and find/develop a different competitive advantage, move to a region (say Virginia, the D.C. Beltway, or possibly Tacoma) where a military background is more likely to be viewed as a competitive advantage, pursue public sector jobs where a military background is a competitive advantage, or educate prospects on why a military background is a competitive advantage. Through this blog and other marketing initiatives I’ve pursued this last course of action.
One possibility that I hadn’t considered was developing a relationship with a national firm with a presence in Portland that does view military experience as a competitive advantage. I recently found an opportunity to do something very much like what I did in the Marine Corps and do it in the Portland area. Furthermore, on researching the firm, I found their corporate mission and vision very similar to my own, and they extensively hired prior military personnel.
This experience was an important reminder to me about competitive advantage: A unique ability is only useful if you can find someone who values i. It can be easier to just find someone who values your competitive advantage than it is to evangelize your cause. Also, it’s good to be in the right place at the right time.
1) Phillip Kotler, Marketing Management: 11th Edition, Prentice Hall 2003, (Pg 82)
Tags: competitive advantage, differentiation, differentiator, marketing, strategy
