The idea behind this book is brilliant: the vast majority of marketing strategy focuses on the relentless pursuit of growth, with too little attention paid to defending existing business. Loss aversion suggests that the logic of marketing strategy should work the other way around: losses hurt us far more than equivalent gains please us. This book has the potential to open our eyes to an important and overlooked aspect of our work. It has the potential to be revolutionary.
Unfortunately, although the concept is original and compelling, the book itself falls disappointingly short.
As it turns out, the strategic options for defending a brand from competitive threats aren’t significantly different to the barriers to market entry set out in traditional economics textbooks: make it expensive for people to enter your market, engage in predatory pricing, establish legal barriers through patents, or out-spend them on marketing. Even the more underhand approaches the book suggests – plagiarism, bullying, litigation, corporate espionage – aren’t particularly imaginative. By the author’s own admission, few of these tactics are really practical. Prices can’t be lowered when a threat is identified and then instantly raised once that threat has been eliminated. Copycat products can’t be launched at the drop of a hat.
Some of the case studies used to back up these suggestions do little to further the author’s cause. We learn that Nike successfully defended against Under Armor (which recently posted its 17th consecutive quarter of over 20% revenue growth) and that Blockbuster failed to defend its business against Netflix and Redbox (as opposed to, say, innovating in response to digital technology).
Nearly two decades ago, Clayton Christensen identified the innovator’s dilemma: that successful companies can put too much emphasis on customers' current needs, and fail to anticipate unstated or future needs. Defending Your Brand may come to represent a more extreme form of dilemma: that paranoid companies place too much emphasis on their own survival, and fail to respond to anybody else’s needs but their own.
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