Compete for Preference, Not Parity

I have a pretty strong reaction when I hear someone explain why a competitor is beating us.

They have more money. They have a bigger sales team. They've been around longer. The buyer already knows them. Their marketing budget is five times ours. They have better distribution, better shelf space, more awareness, more people.

Sometimes all of that is true. I've spent a lot of my career at companies where we were not the biggest player in the market, so I'm not naive about the advantages that come with scale. At HuntWise, we were building a relatively small company in an outdoor market filled with companies that had more money, more history and more resources than we did. Since then, I've worked in other businesses where the competitive set included established brands, major incumbents and companies that could absolutely outspend us if they wanted to.

Those advantages matter. The part I try to watch for is when acknowledging them becomes the end of the conversation.

I've been in marketing meetings where someone pulls up what a competitor is spending and you can almost feel the room lose confidence. I've seen people pitch buyers and spend too much of the conversation explaining how entrenched the incumbent is, as though the buyer is supposed to appreciate how difficult our position is. I've heard teams dissect every advantage a competitor has and somehow walk away with less conviction about their own business than they had when the meeting started.

At some point my reaction is pretty simple: okay, they're bigger. What are we going to do about it?

Because "they have more money" might be a perfectly accurate explanation for part of what is happening, but it isn't a strategy. Neither is "they've been around longer" or "the buyer already likes them." Those things help explain the market as it exists today. They don't tell you what to build tomorrow.

And the customer doesn't know most of this stuff anyway. They don't know that your competitor has a larger marketing budget or that your team has been working short-handed for six months. They don't know that the retailer gave the incumbent better placement, that you wanted another million dollars of media spend, or that the company across the aisle has been building awareness for twenty years.

They experience what is actually in front of them. The product, the price, the brand, the packaging, the website, the salesperson, the reviews, the recommendation from a friend. Somewhere in that experience they decide whether they trust you and whether what you're offering is worth choosing.

That is the part I'm interested in.

Over time, I've started forcing competitive conversations through three questions: What do they actually have? Why does the customer care? And what are we going to do about it?

That's basically the whole framework.

Start with the real advantage

The first question is straightforward: what does the competitor genuinely have that we don't?

You should be honest here. There is no benefit in pretending a real advantage doesn't exist because you want to sound confident.

Maybe they really do have five times your media budget. Maybe they have national distribution and you're still fighting for doors. Maybe their brand awareness is dramatically higher. Maybe they have a sales organization that has been calling on the same buyers for twenty years. Maybe their scale gives them better economics and they can sell something for a price you simply can't match.

All of that matters.

What I try not to do is attach a bunch of emotion to it. Name the advantage, understand it and keep going. Recognizing that another company has built something powerful is not the same thing as conceding the market to them.

In fact, I usually want us to be very clear about where the competitor is stronger. If you're going to compete seriously, you should understand what you're walking into. But once we've named the advantage, I don't want to spend the next six months repeating it.

I want to know why it matters.

Follow it all the way to the customer

This is where competitive conversations tend to get thin.

A competitor having fifty salespeople is not, by itself, a customer benefit. A $10 million marketing budget isn't a customer benefit either. Neither is being twenty years older than you.

Those things matter because of what they create.

Maybe the larger marketing budget has built awareness to the point where consumers recognize the brand immediately and trust it. Maybe the fifty salespeople have created incredible distribution, which means the product is available wherever the customer wants to buy it. Maybe twenty years in the category has created a reputation that makes a retailer comfortable putting more inventory behind the brand.

Now we are talking about something useful.

The question isn't just, "What do they have?" It's, "What did that advantage allow them to build that the customer actually values?"

That distinction matters because teams can become intimidated by the size of another company's machine when the machine itself isn't what we're competing against. We're competing against whatever preference that machine created.

Maybe it created trust. Maybe it created convenience. Maybe it funded a better product. Maybe it made their story incredibly clear. Or maybe, after looking at it honestly, you realize the advantage isn't nearly as important as everyone thought it was.

A competitor can have ten times your resources and still make a mediocre product. A large brand can still have a confusing assortment. An incumbent can have incredible distribution and still be slow to react to what customers want. Scale creates real advantages, but it can also create habits, bureaucracy and blind spots.

Youngme Moon gets at a version of this in Different. One of the ideas I love from her work is that companies can become so focused on their competitors that the whole category starts to converge. One brand adds a feature, everyone adds the feature. Someone changes the packaging, everyone reacts. The entire category gets better at matching each other and worse at being meaningfully different.

I think that is another version of the same trap.

If every competitive conversation starts with what the other company has, eventually your strategy becomes a smaller, weaker version of theirs.

That is not where I want to be.

Don't build a smaller version of the leader

This is probably the mistake I see most often.

The market leader has more people, so we need more people. They advertise in six channels, so we need to be in six channels. They have twenty products, so we need twenty products. They are doing retail, DTC, Amazon, wholesale and marketplaces, so we should probably do all of those too.

Pretty soon you're playing their game with fewer resources.

I've rarely seen that end well.

At HuntWise, we weren't going to win because we had more resources than everyone else in the outdoor space. We had to understand the hunter better. We had to move faster around things people actually cared about, find places where we could be more relevant and make decisions without waiting for the kind of organizational machinery a much larger company has.

There were plenty of moments when being smaller was frustrating, but there were also moments when it was exactly what allowed us to compete. We could move. We could focus. We could make a bet that a much larger company might not make because the opportunity wasn't big enough for them yet.

I've seen the same dynamic in consumer brands.

You might not have the marketing budget of the biggest brand in the category, but maybe you can create a product people genuinely want to talk about. You might not have a twenty-year relationship with a retailer, but you can walk into the room with a customer they aren't reaching or a part of the category that isn't growing. You might not be known by everyone, but you can matter an awful lot to a specific group of people.

That's where the phrase compete for preference, not parity started to make sense to me.

You don't need everything the competitor has. You don't need their headcount, their budget, their distribution and their history before you have permission to win. You need to give the customer a reason to choose you.

That is a different kind of strategy.

What are we actually going to do?

This is the third question, and it is the one that separates strategy from diagnosis.

If they spend five times more than us, what are we going to do differently?

If they're better known, how are we going to be more relevant?

If they own the retailer relationship, what can we bring the buyer that the incumbent isn't bringing?

If they can win by being everywhere, maybe we shouldn't try to be everywhere. Maybe we need to be incredibly good somewhere.

This is where competitive analysis should create action.

If the other brand has enormous awareness, maybe we stop trying to win an awareness war and focus on owning a particular customer or use case. If they're incredibly strong in retail, maybe we build demand somewhere else first. If their scale allows them to be cheaper, maybe price is the wrong battlefield entirely.

I don't think there is one universal answer. That's kind of the point.

The answer depends on why customers are choosing them in the first place.

This is also where I think competitor obsession can become strangely comforting. If you're losing, there is something easier about talking about their budget, their size or their distribution than asking whether the customer simply prefers what they're doing.

I've fallen into that trap too. Anyone who has operated long enough probably has.

Sometimes the uncomfortable answer is that the other company has a better product right now. Or their message is clearer. Or people trust them more. Or they're easier to buy from. Or they understand a particular customer better than we do.

I actually like those answers more because at least we can work with them.

"The customer understands their value proposition faster than ours" is a problem.

"They are bigger than us" is mostly an observation.

The buyer doesn't care that the incumbent is bigger

I've seen this same mentality show up in sales, and maybe that's where it bothers me the most.

You're walking into a buyer meeting trying to win distribution, and half the conversation becomes some version of why the incumbent has an unfair advantage. They've been there forever. They have a bigger program. They get more support. They already have the shelf space.

The buyer knows.

You aren't telling them anything.

And more importantly, the buyer isn't there to solve that problem for you. They want to know why giving you space, inventory or attention is going to make their business better.

Maybe you bring a new customer into the category. Maybe your product solves a hole in the assortment. Maybe the economics are better. Maybe you have evidence that consumers are asking for something the current shelf doesn't offer.

Whatever the answer is, it needs to be about the opportunity in front of them, not sympathy for the disadvantage behind you.

I think the same thing is true with consumers. Nobody grades brands on a curve. They aren't going to buy the second-best product because your team had fewer resources.

Nor should they.

There are obviously markets where the structure really does matter. Regulation can protect incumbents. Exclusive contracts can lock up distribution. Infrastructure or network effects can create very real barriers that aren't solved by making a better Instagram ad.

Sometimes you really are playing a bad game, and the strategic answer is to acknowledge that and go somewhere else.

But most consumer categories aren't completely locked.

People can still change their minds.

That is what makes the whole thing interesting.

If the customer can choose, you have something to work with. You can make the product better. You can make the story clearer. You can get closer to a customer the incumbent is overlooking. You can move faster. You can take a risk the larger company doesn't want to take. You can find an angle that nobody else thinks is worth pursuing yet.

And if the competitor is doing something really well, learn from it. I've never found much use in resenting a company for being good at something. If someone is clearly outperforming you in the market, there is probably something worth studying.

Figure out what they've earned and why customers respond to it. Then decide what you're going to build.

That's the posture I want from a team. Not blind optimism and not pretending competitors don't have advantages. Just a clear-eyed look at what is true, followed by a return to the customer.

What do they have? Why does the customer care? What are we going to do about it?

For me, that's a much more useful competitive conversation.

Because the goal was never to become exactly like the company you're chasing.

The goal is to become the company the customer would rather choose.