Marketing strategy is really competitor strategy.

Tim Barg, our vice president of strategy, and I sat down and rattled off a couple principles we’ve learned over the years:

1. Competitor strategy is counter-intuitive. Your intuition says, “We need to parrot what the leader in our industry is saying, because it’s working for them.” Jack Trout, co-author of Positioning, once said to me, “You always avoid the strengths of the leader.”

I would say that most leaders of organizations do the opposite: they parrot the leader.

2. Instead of messaging specifically, most organizations message generally. They say the same thing as every other organization in their industry.

There seems to be a “fear of the niche.” There seems to be a built-in resistance to focus narrowly on a message. Or becoming good at one thing. They fear being different.

All educational institutions, for example, say they specialize in high academics – which, unless you’re Harvard or Stanford, means essentially nothing. All management consulting firms say they deliver results. All business intelligence software firms say their software deliver better analytics.

All this is confusing to prospective clients or students or donors. If you’re general with your message, you have no hook.

So if you’re having a hard time growing, begin with your competitors. What are they doing? What are they leading with in terms of their messaging? And how are you different?

My next blog topic: “The Myth of the Silver Bullet.”