The Underdog Advantage - Play Offense

Do the Doable and Move the Movable

Whether you are leading a Fortune 100 corporation or running your own small business, two life lessons co-author Scott Miller and I live by are these: Do the Doable . . . and Move the Moveable. Both are explained below along with a great piece on Segmentation & Strategy from one of the best strategic thinkers we know, Roger Martin.

DO THE DOABLE:

Today, every business or organization must deal with scarce resources—including time. “Do the Doable” is the working principle from our books, The Underdog Advantage and The Leadership Campaign, arguing we must pragmatize always and create the real magic of strategic success: Momentum.

Here are the keys:

Never break your pick on the impossible. And never set unrealistic, unreachable goals that will only demoralize your team and potentially energize your competitors.
Remember that you must marshal resources. Don’t spend a penny that’s not “on-strategy” and pointed toward your ultimate win.

Never meet armies with armies directly. Instead, defeat your competition by flanking them or faking them out of position.

Low-hanging fruit? That’s fine . . . but we like even better picking up the fruit on the ground first. Always put the easiest and most obvious goals first.

Put simply, get some first downs and gain momentum. Set achievable goals just sufficient to get you moving in the right direction. And celebrate every small victory on the way to the big one. Don’t think “Hail Mary” pass . . . but do get positive yardage on every play. And do whatever it takes to gain momentum in your group and in your marketplace. Play in places where small wins are inevitable . . because momentum is MAGICAL!

MOVE THE MOVABLE:

The key to marketing in the age of social media and over-crowded and distracted marketplaces is a form of segmentation we call: Move the Movable. This is all about targeting and activating your loyalists—and making them more loyal.

Here are the keys:

Target, as in a political campaign, only the “votes” you need to win by defining who is movable and who is not. Spend your time on the former. Ignore the latter.
So, we look at consumers and employees—and other stakeholders—just as we look at “voters” in a political campaign . . . through a prism that makes “attitudinal segmentation” visible as a spectrum.And it looks like this:

HO SO Undecided SS HS

Or:

Hard Opposition (HO) Soft Opposition (SO) Undecided Soft Support (SS) Hard Support (HS).

Through this prism, you can look at any group as we do in a political campaign, along a spectrum of attitude. It works to reveal the spectrum of support opportunity of anything from an employee group to a marketplace, no matter how complex or sophisticated the marketplace may be. For us, it’s an essential Operating System:

Hard Opposition (HO): These people work against you actively. Forget about moving them into positive territory. Fortunately, in most groups and markets, HO represents only about 5-8% of the whole.

Soft Opposition (SO): They may favor another candidate or brand, but they are not activists. Still, it’s too expensive to win them to HS or even SS. They represent about 15-20% of most markets or groups.
- Undecided: Political campaigns will do and spend anything to win the Undecided on Election Day. By Election Day, the Undecided is usually a fairly small, but very important, group. And in markets, purchase decisions—which are “elections” in themselves—happen frequently, daily, or even several times a day. That’s why in markets the Undecided votes are very, very expensive to win. Worse, the Undecided are often undecided by character. They refuse loyalty to any one candidate or brand, or their “vote” is strictly determined by immediate circumstances: In essence, they are looking for a “bribe” and often they don’t stay loyal to any brand.
- Soft Support (SS): This group might like you or even prefer you, but it won’t actively work for you, recommend you, or regularly purchase your brand. Like the SO, they represent about 15-20% of the market.
- Hard Support (HS): These are your loyalists. They are the solid-rock foundation of success. And though they are a small group (5-8% to begin with), you can turn them into evangelists for you and your brands.
Attitudinal segmentation can be done expensively, with sophisticated data, or cheaply, with guesstimates on the back of a cocktail napkin. You’ll find it easy to segment groups you are familiar with, particularly within your company. And here are the key plays in our insurgent playbook:
- Lock down your HS loyalists, whatever it takes. Nobody but a few saloonkeepers ever went out of business by doing too much for their best customers.
- Move the SS to greater usage and greater loyalty. Use what you learn from the HS to give the SS reasons to like you/your brand better. And we find the HS not only knows a brand better from greater usage, they know it differently. That’s why we always develop for our clients a “Brand Positioning According to the Hard Support.”
- Manage the opposition. Make sure the arguments of the small HO group are not motivating the much larger SO to action against you. And ultimately, you may have to divide and disrupt these two groups if and when they do unite.
- Just forget about the Undecided already. Your life and your money are too short.