What should be our attitude toward our competitors?
Q: It’s been several Fridays that your MRx column has been talking about continuing executive marketing education and training. I head the HRD (Human Resource Department) of a local but large FMCG (fast moving consumer group) company. Our executive training education programs are geared toward healthy attitude and behavior change.
One of our biggest training concerns is the attitude of our marketing and sales managers toward competition. Unfortunately, this attitude is not a matter of corporate policy in our company. It’s actually up to everyone in our Marketing and Sales to take an offensive or defensive attitude toward any specific competitor. However, whenever the competitor who’s moving is a multi-national, our CEO often gives explicit instructions to make “no counter-moves whatsoever.” At other times, we hear Sales telling us that the words from the top floor say: “Do something at the store level but I don’t want to know what. Just do something.”
We regard training for the right attitude and the needed attitude change as critical for our Marketing and Sales to follow in support of the company values and mission. It’s an integral part of, and is fundamental to our Compliance Program and Value Formation Program. Please share with us your best practice experience in this regard.
A: No topic can be more sensitive than corporate values and the professional values of executives. So what we will do is to talk to you and our readers about our experiences with client attitudes toward competition. After this, we will take a position on which attitude is the good and healthy attitude.
We’ll present according to how and how often we’ve encountered those five different ways client marketers and sales regard competition.
Here’s a most common attitude. We call it the “ruthless attitude” and you’ll understand why we refer to it that way after you read how its believer regards its competitors. When asked how this marketer and sales manager behave toward competition, here’s a typical answer: “When dealing with my competitor, my response rule is simple: It’s always better to over-react than to under-react or wait. My attack rule is just as simple: You don’t just hurt your competitor. You come in for the kill. Annihilate the enemy.”
Harold Geneen, former ITT CEO, was known to be “ruthless” with competitors. He also had the related reputation of being “a tyrant with an egotistical bent” and “the consummate workaholic.” Others disagree and regard him as comparable if not even wiser than Peter Drucker. In the local scene, it was Joe Gatchalian, the Unilab president of the 70s and who made Unilab what it became. It was Joe whom the Senior MRx-er heard spoke this way about Unilab’s competitors. Competitors literally dreaded Joe but inside Unilab most people especially medreps and sales reps loved him dearly.
It was David Landes, the Harvard business historian, who documented the attitude that we’ve seen and we refer to as “the realistic and accepting attitude.” According to Professor Landes, “There is an axiom in economics that says: ‘Every situation bears the seed of its own reversal.’ This is the Law of Nemesis that says nothing good lasts indefinitely, because others will want to share in it.”
Professor Landes is the author of the 1998 best-seller, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. It’s a book that’s “a landmark study of world economics” because it sought to explain “why some nations are rich and some are so poor. ”
The New York baseball coach and manager, Yogi Berra, who made it to the baseball Hall of Fame in 1972, said something like what we have called “the game and fun-loving attitude” toward competition. Yogi was heard to say of his rival baseball teams: “I love this competitive game. That’s especially fun when I’m playing against a worthwhile adversary who knows what he’s doing. At first he wins, I lose. But I learn why I lost and come back. Then I win, he loses. He learns, he comes back. And the cycle repeats and afterwards, we both are better off as competitors than at the start.” It’s an attitude akin to Professor Landes’ “realistic and accepting attitude.”
There’s a fourth attitude that we’ve come to call “the Hamlet attitude” and here’s why. Faced with a competitor or any competitor, the Hamlet marketer or sales manager says something like what Shakespeare’s Hamlet said about his mother: “To compete or not to compete. That is the question. … But maybe it’s better to wait. In 80 percent to 90 percent of the cases, nothing really bad comes out of those competitor moves. So most of the time, I’m better off waiting things out.”
We’ve witnessed this most among marketers and sales executives of small and medium companies. They explained that they’re too small to be that affected by large company competitor’s maneuvers. They also believe that it’s their market segment that shields them because it’s not big enough for large companies to bother about.
Finally, here’s a once-in-a-while “welcoming and benevolent attitude.” It’s an attitude whose statement has been ascribed to Walter Wheeler Jr., the CEO of Pitney-Bowes, the US postage meter manufacturer. Wheeler said that: “The purpose of competition is not to beat someone down, but to bring out the best in every player.” This is the kind of attitude that’s a breath of fresh air in this deadly “red” ocean. And it’s the attitude toward competition that your corporate value system should take as a matter of policy and that your compliance and value formation programs should hold as its basic pillar.
Keep your questions coming. Send them to us at [email protected] or [email protected]. God bless!
