To follow up on the article Are you Learning From your Competition’s Mistakes? I’d like to continue investigating the idea that the best way to move forward is to speak to the decision maker in the brain. For mistakes, we want to talk to the posterior medial frontal cortex. Read previous article for more info.
When we talk about attacking the leader’s weaknesses/mistakes, people frequently study the Coke and Beer wars. The mistakes the leaders made with responding to the attacks by competitors. Meaning you are the classic Coke and have a bite to your flavor. When Pepsi attacks you saying they are sweeter and the next generation choice, the worst thing to do is ditch your product and recreate it sweeter and younger with new Coke. You are playing in the competition’s frame.
What about mistakes like the non-market leader attempting to lead? We saw Miller High Life bury themselves with this. What about something more modern? The iPhone phenomena is certainly nothing to ignore with Android’s aggressive campaigns against it.
Droid was successful with its campaign, the data speaks for itself:
What was the number one issue with iPhones? It can’t do… well it couldn’t do a lot of things. Motorola and Verizon took on a huge initiative to tackle the world’s number one selling smartphone. Enter late 2009 the Droid! Focusing on the errors of the competition it launched the “Droid Does” campaign focusing on multitasking, flash, and other features the iPhone didn’t support. Had Droid focused on out performing it may not have turned out successful. Droid would not be registering in the pMFC the way we want it to achieve psychological mirroring of a pain point. Review the army of phones in the graveyard buried by the mighty iPhone.
It didn’t take long for Android operating systems to really take off. As a consumer, we want better, but just saying something is better won’t work. You need concrete evidence of solving a pain point. You might immediately wonder, “well Droid still isn’t number 1, can you really call that successful?” Absolutely, very rarely will the number one be overthrown (it absolutely can and will happen) but in this case, Apple responded appropriately. They fixed the pain point and continued to innovate. Well they’re not there with flash, but they have multitasking and many other features that the Droid Does campaign originally picked on solved. Anyone listening to the iPad2 announcement recently will know what I’m talking about with innovation. However, from a short term launch, the data once again speaks for itself. Look how quickly consumers were able to identify with some of issues of their current favorite phone. Smart indeed!
Android as of Q4 of 2010 had 25.5% of worldwide market share for smartphone operating systems, up from 3.5% a year ago.
I like how you interpreted the marketing campaign from Droid side. I would love to share this article on twitter, but do not see the tools on your website. Can you add those please?
Sure, added them now. New theme doesn’t add them in by default so sometimes I forget :\ Thanks for pointing that out!