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IV. 10 Operating Principles of Asymmetric Marketing:
The goal of asymmetric marketing is to create an ‘asymmetric advantage’ that drives the growth of the business and generates continuous momentum. Through the integration of proven practices, asymmetric war theory and complexity theory, I’ve settled on 10 principles I work with to meet the challenge of marketing in the sandstorm economy. In each of these operational principles, the key challenge is to identify the ‘naturally occuring’ asymmetry that you can leverage to create and increase momentum and drive leadership. Future essays will be devoted to explaining these principles in more detail. But by way of introduction for my impatient a-marketing readers, I list them below.
Principle One: Asymmetric Symbiosis
Symbiosis is co-evolution of species. It can be mutually rewarding for the co-evolving species or it can be parasitic and predatory. Big fish eating little fish. Asymmetric symbiosis is co-evolution practiced in a way that makes you stronger, period. While a traditional starting point for many tech marketers is identifying the ‘target customer’, a-marketers identify what I call the TAO (targets of asymmetric opportunity). Targets of asymmetric opportunity are the installed base ecosystems of other vendors in the tech industry. It is the basically co-evolutionary nature of tech businesses that provides the a-marketer with a ‘host’ or ‘multiple hosts’ to attach your business to in order to increase momentum. By concentrating on infiltrating installed base ecosystems in multiple forms, a-marketers harness the asymmetry of other companies’ success and failure. Within the symbiotic relationship, a-marketers can transform their own absolute inferiority into relative superiority and the outline of a winning strategy emerges. Your future customers are somebody else’s customers right now. Symbiosis is a concept in complexity theory, as well as in the military (we hooked up with Northern Alliance ‘ecosytem’ in Afghanistan, the Kurdish ecosystem in Iraq), and is a proven practice of long term category leaders like Microsoft or emerging tech leaders like BEA Systems.
Principle Two: Asymmetric Initiative
Remember the TV debate about the Pentagon’s Iraq war plan? It was about maintaining initiative with long supply lines that could potentially come under fire. For tech marketers maintaining initiative is about ‘feeding off the opponent’, to quote Sun Tzu. In my world the customer is the primary opponent that must be ‘conquered’ in order to maintain healthy momentum. In the sandstorm economy, a-marketers seek to customer-fund every product, transforming projects into products in the face of reduced R&D budgets, and tough-to-find venture and IPO capital. For startups, turnarounds or ‘startovers’ and emerging leaders this principle is critical. For dominant players it’s also essential as a way to fund entry into new markets. Joint sales/marketing/engineering ‘special operations’ teams need to be the basic team unit for asymmetric marketers. Network-centric warfare, remember. Asymmetric Initiative is a way of operating your offensive and defensive marketing campaigns in ways that let you win from being both ‘pro-active’ and ‘reactive’. By understanding the principle of asymmetric initiative, startups learn to ‘bootstrap’ themselves, and market share leaders lay the foundation for more revenue visibility and stability.
Principle Three: Asymmetric Positioning
Traditional tech marketing recommends that you develop a positioning strategy that emphasizes ‘unique, sustainable and relevant’ advantages. But in a sandstorm economy, categories collapse, get cluttered, disappear into other categories, get abandoned, implode, etc. as competitors scramble for business. Asymmetric positioning strategy acknowledges this and develops positioning that is flexible and pre-emptive, not necessarily sustainable. It’s about positioning that leverages what Sun Tzu calls ‘formlessness’, so that the opponent cannot attack what he cannot see clearly. I work with a positioning methodology I call PRIME (Positioning for Regularly Imploding Market Environments), that enables a-marketers to pre-emptively become the first in the category over and over again. IBM eBusiness is now eBusiness on Demand. It’s about being there first so that the competition comes to fight you on your ground.
Principle Four: Asymmetric Messaging
Tech marketing communications and messaging in the 2nd inning of the internet is steadily evolving from an emphasis on static ‘brand monologue’ into dynamic reputational dialogue or conversation. Brands blow up, sometimes over night. Martha Stewart is a brand, Rudy Guiliani Consulting is a ‘reputation’. I rest my case. Brand Marketing is at a crossroads. 200 customers dumped Andersen within days even though the courts didn’t rule for months. Negative reputational association was the verdict. More people would rather wear an NYPD or FDNY hat than a t-shirt from many high tech companies. Capturing perceived moral high ground is important. If you are fighting on the eFront, providing critical technology in the war on terror, you want people to know it. In the sandstorm economy, well known brand icons have become actual and potential ‘soft targets’ of those who would seek to bring down the whole free enterprise system on a global basis. Marketing communications, PR and advertising agencies, as well as in-house Marcom organizations need to invest in conversation and eFront association using the internet, and concentrate on meeting reputational uncertainty head on.
Principle Five: Asymmetric Offerings
Many tech marketers lose traction and momentum by seeking to artificially construct what they believe to be ‘whole products’ when the sandstorm is not really allowing them to see clearly or their internal ‘machinery’ is breaking down. Sandstorm-ready a-marketers understand that unstoppable offerings are a fusion of technology, services, and embedded ‘network capital’. Asymmetric offerings are ‘compound’ and ‘continuous’ (constantly updated) and resist duplication by others. In future essays, I will go into Asymmetric Offerings in great detail. In point of fact, the companies that have demonstrated the most traction and momentum in the post-bubble tech environment have worked hard to develop asymmetric offerings that leverage 2nd inning internet effects that make their products, services and offerings virtually non-duplicatable. This is real market power.
Principle Six: Asymmetric Customer Management
For many tech marketers not fully detoxed from the bubbleboy culture, the twin brother of ‘new economy’ theory is ‘customer economy’ theory. The customer economy concept, while not wrong per se, is often applied to result in toxic ‘customer co-dependence’, giving your customers an asymmetric advantage over you. This is insane. Asymmetric customer management is about developing and executing a strategy to ‘lock in ‘ the customer. You want customers that ‘co-evolve’ within the context of your control, that serve as evangelists for your products and services. You also want to weed out and jettison the high maintenance (bad) customers. Controlling your customer is a way to see in the sandstorm economy, to make the customer your soldier. If you learn anything from studying proven practices of customer dominance at Microsoft, learn this.
Principle Seven: Asymmetric Models
For tech companies in the sandstorm economy, models need to be hybrid, i.e. revenue needs to be derived from the integration of licensing revenue, subscription revenue, services revenue, e-business fees, etc. Models need to rugged and flexible, like the mythical dragon called the ‘hydra’. To paraphrase Sun Tzu, a good army is like a snake…… ‘if you are attacked at the head, counter with the tail, if attacked at the tail, counter with the head, and if attacked at the middle, counter with both the head and the tail.' Hydra models are not popular with venture capitalists who spoonfeed the concept of ‘focus’ to their portfolio companies. But I believe VCs will change their viewpoint once they give up babysitting deals and invest in companies that have management teams who prefer more bootstrapping and less VC funding. Hydra models power more than a few of the highest valuation public companies, providing a hedge against on-again/off-again uncertainty.
Principle Eight: Asymmetric Distribution
Tried and true channel marketing became a mainstay for technology companies through most of the 80s and 90s, even as information-rich customer-direct models (the Dell model) have commanded attention. But distribution strategy needs to drive demand creation, not just fulfillment. A-distribution strategy turns the traditional ‘sell/distribute’ framework on it’s head focusing on a “distribute/sell” approach that leverages the trialware capabilities of the internet for both downloadable software and hosted applications. Without this inversion, distribution and partner strategy can get bogged down and be very expensive to ‘irrigate’ in the sandstorm. Asymmetric distribution is ecosystem marketing and is all about co-evolution and market creation. As once-stable customer revenue periodically contracts and grows less certain (the ‘revenue visibility’ issue), companies will evolve new categories of partnering and grow ecosystems that enable them to co-create new opportunities. Checkpoint’s successful OPSEC alliance in internet security is a good example of a channel program evolving into modern ecosystem marketing, providing a symbiotic distribution opportunity for hundreds of Checkpoint partners.
Principle Nine: Asymmetric Dominance
A-marketers understand that it is not enough to ‘lock in’ customers. You have to lock out competitors, and optimally, create a ‘no fly zone’ where they will have trouble if they enter. Asymmetric marketers strive for ‘natural monopolies’ in which they set the rules for the segments in which they compete, e.g. Microsoft. More innovation and new symbiotic startups emerge from dominant ecosystems than any other. Asymmetric dominance is essentially the driving of an industry restructuring or re-ordering around your rules. Asymmetric dominance usually evolves from a position of relative weakness to one of relative strength. Management teams at technology and e-business companies have no choice. They must see the sandstorm economy as an opportunity to expand their company’s market footprint and become the undisputed category leader in their company’s chosen category.
Principle Ten: Asymmetric M&A
The end result of well-managed M&A activity is to create a stable, rugged market participant that can thrive in the environment of uncertainty and further lead and define the rules for the category in which it participates. I call this asymmetric M&A. Asymmetric M&A is one path to continuous category leadership. It is the path of creatively acquiring the assets and corporate DNA needed to maintain and expand your marketing no-fly-zone. Asymmetric M&A is about identifying new ‘acquisition DNA’ in the form of new products, new customers, new partners and ultimately new organic growth through the successful integration of the new DNA. Asymmetric M&A can be implemented by companies of any size and takes the form of:
- Outright buyouts of complementary companies
- Marriage of equals among competitors
- Asset acquisition of ailing ‘fallen angels’ and ‘dysfunctional dotcoms’
- Exclusive licensing agreements and IP (intellectual property) acquisitions
Organizations need to build and empower strong corporate development teams that are chartered to practice asymmetric M&A and are closely aligned with marketing special ops teams, not out doing their own thing. In the 2000-2003 time frame, smart asymmetric marketers have used M&A activity to become more dominant, while those practicing the bubbleboy M&A ‘synergy’ approach have faltered. Divine is a case study in non-asymmetric M&A.
Conclusion
In this essay, I’ve introduced (in a basic way) the 4 dimensions of asymmetric marketing:
Culture: Asymmetric marketers know we are evolving from cargo-cult entrepreneurism and bubbleboy marketing culture to a true ‘bootstrapped’ eFront entrepreneurism and special ops ‘tribalism’ that is in fact the true legacy of American high technology companies;
Context: Asymmetric marketers know we are evolving from the ‘new economy’ to the new uncertainty of the tech sandstorm, a context of war, terrorism, economic volatility, IT spending contraction, and corporate reputational implosion due to corruption. At the same time there are the positive trends of ‘g-transformation’, new corporate imperatives and the emergence of 2nd inning internet effects as companies successfully blend the internet into their overall multi-channel business frameworks.
Theory: Asymmetric marketers know we are evolving from ‘new rules’ and ‘no rules’ of the bubbleboys and their analyst e-aristocracy, to an integration of proven practices of industry leaders, asymmetric war theory, and complexity theory. A-marketers value experience and base their ideas on experience. At the same time they strive to blend both orthodox and unorthodox approaches to solve marketing problems and address opportunities. Their goal is ‘full spectrum market dominance’ and the establishment of market ‘no-fly-zones’ that make it easier to manage their businesses in the sandstorm economy.
Operational Principles: Asymmetric marketers apply 10 basic operational principles that break down the theory of a-marketing into practical guidelines for day-to-day marketing operations. In the essays to follow, I will expand on these principles one by one, and hopefully my web developer will deploy some ‘blogging’ software so I can capture the natural asymmetry and momentum of reader feedback. Until then, stay busy ‘vanquishing’.
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Copyright 2001-2003, Joseph E. Bentzel. All Rights Reserved.
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