My God, that gorilla weighs 800 pounds!
If it hasn’t happened to your industry yet, you can be sure it will. The 800 pound gorilla will come after you. He will sit wherever he wants, maybe right next to his store, and try to get him out of the bank.
It happened to toy stores, and the gorilla was called Toys R Us. And now a new, bigger gorilla is hard at work putting Toys R Us out of business. It happened to the local pharmacy, and the bouncer was called Walgreen’s or CVS. It has happened to the local restaurant, the local bookstore, the video rental, the local department store, the employment agency, the tax preparer, and just about every type of business imaginable. It’s only a matter of time until the gorilla comes after your industry and after you!
Sure, there are still some local toy stores, bookstores, diners, etc, but to survive they must be very good at what they do and they must market aggressively because the gorilla is good at what you do, and has a great marketing department with a budget advertising much higher than yours. It also has a large headquarters and regional staff of experts trained in all of its business functions: purchasing, production, human resources, accounting, design, inventory control, logistics, and administration.
How can you compete, survive and thrive against that gorilla? You can’t keep doing business the way you’ve done for years, that’s for sure!
It does this by leveraging its local knowledge, knowing its customers and its industry. You build your strengths by making them stronger and minimizing your weaknesses. You do this by working to raise your company’s skills and better professionalize your staff to please your customers and anticipate their needs. It does this by creating and developing personalized services, programs, and efforts to please them in ways that the gorilla cannot, due to its size and scale.
How do you become more aggressive with a limited budget? You start by thinking carefully about how you market, who you market to, how best to inform and excite your prospects, and develop a planned attack to impress your target market. If you do all of that, you can survive and even thrive when that gorilla goes after your customers, as it certainly will. After all that, you need to work on constant improvement because if you beat that gorilla today, he’ll be back for sure.
