David's victory over Goliath was a triumph of speed and agility over brute strength, and small organizations everywhere have depended on being able to beat their bigger, better-funded competitors to the punch. But what if Goliath had been strong and fast? Grant McCracken (who's been on fire lately) thinks we'll be seeing a lot more speedy innovation from the Goliaths of consumer goods packaging, and that leaves us both wondering how that'll affect marketing in general:
What happens to the competitive landscape when this is so? Big brands will stream better than small ones. We may think of them as big pipes, capable of carrying a vast amount and diversity of brand meanings. Little brands, new to the world, will “stream” at their peril. They will need constancy to stake their claim to a place in the marketplace.
Clearly, this reverses the traditional relationship. Now big brands will be the changeable ones. Little brands will be boring, stodgy, and a little predictable. They will be forced to give away the very dynamism on which new entries traditionally depend. Hmm. How then will little brands manage to come up? What will the advantage of littleness be?
If little brands lose the ability to appeal to new markets and steal share from big brands on the basis of innovation, they're going to have to stop playing offense and start playing defense. They're going to have to focus on the customers/donors/users they currently have, get to know them in excruciating detail, and meet their every need with a relentless focus on customer/donor/user satisfaction. As big brands up the innovation ante, acquisition costs for new customers/donors/users will rise, and retention will be everything.
(This echoes a point Joseph DePalma made the other week on his Marketing Blog, and I think it's just as true for small nonprofits as it is for small companies. Full disclosure: Joseph was nice enough to send a good bit of traffic my way recently, but no blogrolling here. No ethics were harmed in the creation of this post.)
