Marketing Jujitsu

Top-secret, sneaky marketing strategies to help you beat your competition by turning their own strengths against them.

(Shel Horowitz's Frugal Marketing Tip, December, 2000)

Traditional marketing classes spend a lot of time talking about market share—and quite frankly, I've never really understood this. In my mind, if you're meeting your sales and income goals, what does it matter if other businesses are also succeeding?

But sometimes there's a situation where a competitor comes in determined to drive you out, and brings a huge amount of firepower to bear: massive ad campaigns in the Yellow Pages, local newspapers, and so forth.

So what's a small business owner to do? How can you survive an onslaught by a well-funded competitor who doesn't understand that there's enough to go around?

Try a little marketing jujitsu. In jujitsu, as in many martial arts, you turn your attacker's strengths to your advantage, and can flip someone much larger than you over your shoulder and onto the mat.

Say a large chain store has moved in, and spent aggressively on Yellow Pages advertising that dwarfs your little ad. Figure out a promotion that can harness their muscle to your advantage: such as half off or two-for-one if the customer brings in your competitor's Yellow Pages ad. Voila, you have physically removed the ad from many of the phone books in your area—maybe even all the phone books, if your offer is good enough! And your competitor is still shelling out thousands of dollars a month for an ad that no one sees! (Of course, don't try that strategy if your ad happens to be on the back of theirs!)

You may not make much profit on those individual sales, but think of it as a marketing cost. You are actually buying back the competitor's advertising, for pennies on the dollar! By the time they figure out what you're doing, your strategy will be well underway—and when they switch to, say, newspaper advertising, you'll have a trick up your sleeve to neutralize that as well.

Thank you reading this back issue of Shel Horowitz's Monthly Frugal Marketing Tips, published every month since May, 1997; please click here to view the complete archives, grouped by subject. Shel is an internationally known copywriter and marketing consultant, author of Grassroots Marketing Getting Noticed in a Noisy World, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and several other books, and creator of the Frugal Marketing web site. Please click here to contact Shel.


To visit the most important pages on our site (and our sister sites, frugalfun.com and accuratewriting.com), make a selection from the drop-down menu below.