I went to my friend Mark’s Memorial Service in Los Angeles yesterday. It was a nice remembrance of him. When I returned to where I am staying, I was searching the internet and found this video of him right around the time I had met him.
He had started Win Products. I wound up being an investor, but we didn’t do very well.
Mark was highly competitive. He was wily. Watch this video and you will get a very very small flavor of it.
No one in corporate America had thought of becoming the “official detergent” of the US Olympic Team. No one. They just aren’t innovative and aggressive that way. Big Soap just likes to eat up shelf space to stop competition.
Mark saw an opening and he took it. He put the Olympic rings on his label.
How ticked off do you think some upper manager was sitting in their Cincinnati office when they found out? How many meetings do you think they had with underlings?
Getting the Olympic endorsement wasn’t the thing that was the undoing of Win. But, it put them on the radar screen. When you are a startup, it’s probably better to sneak up on the big guys. Imagine being a tugboat out on the ocean and pulling up to an aircraft carrier.
The core problem with Win at the end of the day was the team had a great product, found a great niche, and was awesome at selling into distribution. BUT, the product didn’t have enough marketing dollars behind it to generate turns at the store. It came in, but it didn’t walk out.
Win wasn’t good at guerilla marketing either. Word of mouth marketing could have helped it tremendously, but they just didn’t have that skill set. WOMM has always been around, but it was very random until people like Ted Wright took randomness out of it.
I have been invested in startups that didn’t even want to announce fundraising rounds because they wanted to stay under the radar and quietly build their business.
In today’s climate, people often step up on the soapbox and use a megaphone. They shout and do brash stuff to get attention. Often though, the best strategy is to be like a commando and sneak in, get what you want, and sneak out.
Great advice. Guerrilla marketing has been mainstreamed. It is now required.
That knife in the pic of the Royal Marines is a Fairburn-Sykes Commando knife carried by elite forces in WWII (Brit, Can, American) and since then.
It is a very dangerous weapon. I carried one in my day.
JLM
www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com
Build market share first, or at least steadily increasing revenue and then profits.
Always have a sinking fund to be prepared for the inevitable battles that await.
Taking on one big dog at a time is doable and they can be outmaneuvered, outhought and outworked, but it's tough when there's two or three big dogs attacking at the same time.