How being different can help companies succeed by Alastair Dryburgh, Management Today, March 2010

I looked forward to reading this article as there are so few good contributions on strategy and, at first sight, this one seemed to be covering issues of much relevance to managers during the economic downturn. After reading it and being very disappointed, I called in my colleague Chris Goodwin for a second opinion; Chris is much more in touch with latest thinking on strategy and very quick to spot anything that is outdated or superficial. And he certainly did spot both these features and his disappointment was even higher than mine.


The basic argument at the beginning of the article is hard to argue with; the obvious truth that being distinctively different from competitors is a good thing and is important to business success. But the author then suggests three secrets of success:

• To focus on the customer.
• To use the ideas of Michael Porter.
• To steal from competitors.

The need for customer focus may seem to be an obvious truth and many businesses succeed by following that approach but the author does not make any convincing link between customer focus and being different from competitors. In most industries all the successful players are likely to have good customer focus and, as a single approach, this is not going to work, indeed it might even lead to lots of ‘me too’ offerings. In many rapidly changing markets, the best way of achieving major differentiation is to know more than the customer; to be like Apple, to know what the customer is likely to want in the future and to persuade them to desire your innovative new products.

The lack of depth in much of the article’s content is betrayed by the shallowness of his advice to readers concerning Michael Porter; that we should use his ideas ‘even if we don’t read his book’. The obvious question which we would like to have addressed to Mr Dryburgh is - which of Porter’s ideas out of his eighteen books are you referring to?

The rest of the article indicates that he was probably referring to Porter’s first book on Competitive Strategy in 1980 though his article in the HBR a year earlier made the initial impact. Though much of the content is still valid today, the author does not seem to realise that the thinking of Porter and his peers has moved on, for instance that it is also possible to differentiate by a unique bundling of activities that competitors cannot or will not copy.

Though we do not like his choice of language, the author does make a good point about the idea of stealing from competitors, how it is often best to wait for others to innovate and - subject to patent protection - improve on their ideas. It would have been even more impressive to mention ‘Fast Second’ the more recent work by Geroski and Markides which produces convincing evidence that in many cases - particularly large organisations - copying innovation from others is more successful than being first mover.

The author does make a brave attempt to produce examples of Porter’s three generic strategies (Cost leadership, Differentiation, Niche Player) but on further examination these do not quite fit. Porter’s more recent thinking would suggest that Southwest Airlines and Ryanair are not just about cost leadership, it is more about these companies having unique strategic positioning within their sector. And are JD Wetherspoon and Reckitt Benckiser really examples of true differentiation or are they just excellent, customer focussed operators?

Maybe we are being little unfair because the issues around strategy are complicated and is difficult to summarise all the complexities in one relatively short article. But our advice to Mr Dryburgh would be to ignore his own advice and to read Porter’s later articles, in particular the one titled ‘What is Strategy?’ He would then perhaps appreciate how dangerous it can be to oversimplify something that is not at all simple.

To read this article go to:

http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/search/article/985301/how-different-help-companies-succeed/