How to Drive Your Competition Crazy
Kawasaki on competing through service, speed and irritating incumbents
Summary
Kawasaki, then recently of Apple, wrote this as a tactical guide to competing against larger or established rivals. It is organised around specific manoeuvres rather than around strategy, and its premise is that a small company beats a large one through speed, focus and attention to what customers actually experience.
The tactics include: know your competitor better than they know themselves, including buying their products and using their support; define the competitive dimension yourself rather than accepting the incumbent's; serve the customers the incumbent finds unprofitable or annoying; make yourself easy to buy from, which he treats as a competitive weapon because large companies make themselves hard to deal with; turn customers into evangelists by giving them something worth telling others about; and use publicity rather than advertising because it is cheaper and more credible.
He also covers a set of practices about competing honourably, arguing that attacking competitors directly usually raises their profile and damages your own credibility, and that the better use of energy is making the competitor irrelevant to your customers.
The book is from 1995 and its examples are from that period, so the specific cases are dated. It is tactical rather than analytical, and it has no framework connecting the tactics. Readers wanting competitive strategy should go to Porter or Brandenburger and Nalebuff. Its value is as a checklist of practical moves for a small company that needs to act rather than analyse, and Kawasaki's arguments about evangelism and ease of purchase anticipated a great deal of later practice.
Key takeaways 7
- A small company should define the dimension of competition itself rather than accept the one the incumbent has established.
- Serving customers the incumbent finds unprofitable or annoying is the reliable entry point, because the incumbent will not defend them.
- Making your company easy to buy from is a competitive weapon, since large organisations reliably make themselves difficult to transact with.
- Buying and using a competitor's product and support is the cheapest and most underused source of competitive information.
- Publicity is cheaper and more credible than advertising, and a small company should invest in being newsworthy rather than in media purchase.
- Attacking a competitor directly raises their profile and damages your credibility, so the better move is making them irrelevant to your customers.
- Customers who tell other customers are worth more than any marketing expenditure, and earning that requires giving them something specific worth repeating.
Who should read it
Founders competing against larger established rivals who want tactical moves rather than a strategic framework.
About Guy Kawasaki
Chief evangelist at Canva; earlier Apple's Macintosh evangelist and a co-founder of Garage Technology Ventures.
The Art of the Start breaks early-company work into concrete tasks - pitching, positioning, recruiting, bootstrapping, partnering - for founders with no prior company behind them. The Macintosh Way and Selling the Dream document how Apple built developer and customer evangelism into a product launch, which is where the modern practice of developer relations comes from.
Who recommended it 1 · 1 direct
“Awesome book. On my Top Ten List. CEO of garage.com and a friend.”
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