eating the big fish book review

Review by: Raghav Gandotra

Robin Ganjoo

MARKET

The Big Fish – Market Leader

Fish with a difference – Market Challenger

Preparation for the Kill

To grow yourself so that you can eat the big fish – to become the leader

The Size & Nature of the Big Fish

Ubiquitous Service Stations of Maruti. Research and Development Resources of P & G. Distribution network of ITC.

The Law of Increasing Returns

Relationship between Share of Market – Share of Voice.

Stage One: Consumer Awareness – Who does our target think about first ? Top-of-mind awareness.

Stage Two: Shopping – What happens when the consumer leaves the house?

Stage Three: Purchase & Loyalty – A Picture is Emerging

The Consequence: Profitability – Brand Leaders making more damn money than . . .

The mush in the middle

Try to avoid this situation as much as possible

The Consumer Isn't The Consumer Isn’t –

How much of your marketing does your consumer really want to consume?

The Audience Isn’t – Time – traditional 24 hrs a day and lunch hr. Relationships – divorce rate. Bathroom tissue.

The Category Isn’t – Things you throw in the basket with the frozen chicken. How much more I pay (Dry Cleaner & Airlines).

Communication Doesn't – Seizing the audience’s imagination. Competitive advertising review.

We Need Ideas

The unexpected pairing of attention and imagination of the target. It is self-propagating, once seeded, it does not require constant external feeding to flourish.

What is a Challenger Brand“We are Number Two, so we try Harder”

The Three Criteria – • State of Market• State of Mind • Rate of Success

The Principal Challenger Brands Considered here – • Attack• Redefine• Attitude

What’s a Search Engine going to tell me –• Identity• Emotion• Intensity• Objective

Come-on you . . .

Stay cool and focused

The Eight Credos of Successful Challenger Brands

THE POWER OF

EIGHT

THE FIRST CREDO:

INTELLIGENT NAIVETY

THE VITALITY OF INEXPERIENCE

• ‘‘Do the opposite of what everyone else is doing.”

• For example : ITC’s Sunfeast & Bingo..!!

Sense of Innocence with Ever Readiness

“Experience is what gets you through the door, but experience also closes the door. You tend to rely on memory and stick with what has worked before. You don’t try anything new.” “ Inexperience erases fear. You do not know what is and is not possible and therefore everything is possible.” - Twyla Tharp

ASKING UPSTREAM QUESTIONS

Andrew Grove, Intel and Gordon Moore.

• Andrew Grove fired himself. In 1985, Intel, far from being a Brand Leader (or even a Challenger) and at the time a player mainly in the memory-chip business, seemed unable to match the Japanese price/value offer and remain profitable.

• To demonstrate emotionally to himself the need to wipe the slate genuinely clean, he began again by inviting his chairman to walk out of the Intel building with him as if they had both been fired; they would reenter the building not as Andrew Grove and Gordon Moore, but as the newly recruited replacements for themselves.

• Sitting down afresh in the boardroom they had just mentally vacated, they looked with new eyes at the business they had been managing for the previous few years and identified immediately the key issue the company faced: that it was in the wrong business. It had to get out of memory and put the entire emphasis of the company behind what had been a secondary priority, namely microprocessors. In one dramatic moment, Grove created the ability to see through innocent eyes the solution to a problem.

THE SECOND CREDO:

BUILD A LIGHTHOUSE IDENTITY

WHAT IS A LIGHTHOUSE IDENTITY?

A Lighthouse brand is one that has a very clear sense of where it stands, and why it stands there.

You notice it even if you are not looking for it.

THE THIRD CREDO:

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP OF A CATEGORY

Brand Leaders

• Market Leader The biggest player, the brand everyone lives with

• Thought Leader The brand in the category that everyone talks

about

THE FOURTH CREDO:

CREATE SYMBOLS OF RE-EVALUATION

Re Evaluate means accessing all the factors when taking a risk

Nick Ross, a group of television journalists and Road safety in the United Kingdom.

Three-part strategy to puncture the ignorance of road users & British people :• Firstly, reframe the whole concept of what

was happening. So he reframed the 6,000 annual road deaths not as just another statistic, but as an ‘’epidemic.’’

And he called his BBC documentary about road safety ‘‘The Biggest Epidemic of Our Times.’’

• Second, he recognized that he needed to make the abstract numbers more than just abstract numbers.

So at the opening of his documentary he took a typical British market town, Wallingford (population 6,000),and filmed the entire town lying down, as if dead. And within those first three minutes, he quoted : We would indeed now sit down and lean forward into a program about the topic we had previously known as ‘‘road safety.’’

• Thirdly, Ross changed the language for the authorities, as well as the frame for the British people.

He told the authorities they should revise their targets: Instead of 6,000, they should aim to kill only 4,000 people a year. The other side was incensed. ‘‘Kill?’’

PUNCTURE THE WAY CONSUMERS THINK.

SWATCH SWISS DM 60 – SYMBOL OF RE-EVALUATION

THE FIFTH CREDO:

SACRIFICE

“A great brand is going to evoke passion. You’re going to love it or hate it. And I’m good with that. I’m good with people loving us. And I’m good with people hating us.” - Peter van Stolk, (Founder of Jones Soda)

APPLE’s Sacrifice

Pivotal importance of Sacrifice.

• Apple had to cut its projects from 150 to just 3-the iMac, the iBook, and the G3 chip.• When Nano ipod was launched,it stopped

producing mini.

THE SIXTH CREDO:

OVERCOMMITMENT

• To bind beyond the capacity for realization.

• In order to genuinely succeed, a brand will have to break through barriers that the team behind it, can already anticipate.

THE SEVENTH CREDO:

USING COMMUNICATIONSAND PUBLICITY TO ENTER

SOCIAL CULTURE

Young colleagues ask me: ‘‘What is the advertising budget?’’‘‘None!’’ I say. The first rule is: Never shit like a bird; shit like an elephant. You ever seen birdshit? Not unless it hits you in the forehead. But you don’t forget elephant shit. It’s dramatic. - Adrian Zecha, founder of Aman Resorts

THE EIGHTH CREDO:

BECOME IDEA-CENTERED, NOT CONSUMER-CENTERED

THE VALUE OF AN IDEA

“If we want things to stay as they are, they will have to change.” - Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard

Applying the Challenger Program

• To begin to develop innovative strategic approaches.• To create a new way of seeing the market and its possibilities.• To generate a new and more aggressive attitude towards

business development.

Summery and Plan:• What is the big fish?• Who we are? What is our unique point of view and why does

it matter?• What are the three main ideas in each section that have the

most opportunity to transform our business?

WHAT NEXT ???

THEN COMMIT OVER IT

Challenger As A State Of Mind: Staying Number One Means Thinking Like A Number Two

Risk, Will and the Circle of Rope

Risk, is it in

you