Transform Your Business Blog

At a discussion over lunch today, the topic of Burger King moving back into the Japanese market came up. We were talking about how they would handle the marketing for their second time around, and the question as to whether or not Burger King would make use of “the King” came up. If you’re not familiar with the King, Slate’s Seth Stevenson has done the best write-up of this marketing phenomenon that I’ve come across.

Here’s the King’s Super Bowl ad:

My thoughts were that the King could generate fresh buzz marketing in Japan, if played right. Given the massive blog scene in Japan, a few viral videos could spread very quickly, should Burger King hook up with the right marketing agencies. Any thoughts?

I included this quote in my previous post:

If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.

- Henry Ford

We all know what a faster horse is, depending on what industry we work in. A ‘faster horse’ may be an advantage or a small improvement over a competitor, but it’s not truly innovative and doesn’t move the customer to feel loyal to your brand. In other words, a faster horse is something that, if two products or services are essentially equal, will give one a slight advantage over the other…it’s a tweak.

That might sound great, but consider price. Price is a faster horse. Maybe I sell pencils and you sell pencils. Perhaps they’re even the exact same pencils, made at the same factory. We both get them wholesale for five cents each and sell them for ten cents each. If I drop my price to nine cents, I will most likely outsell you. Same product, lower price. A faster horse.

The problem: You can undercut my price, and I can undercut yours again. Competing on the faster horse is a huge waste of time, energy and resources because we’re involved in a war of attrition. Neither of us is creating something new and eventually, we’ll both be selling pencils for six cents, until one (or both) of us goes out of business. Horses only go so fast.

In the meantime, someone will come along and actually change the product. He or she will sell something different - a blue pencil, a pen/pencil combination, a pencil that doubles as chopsticks, a pencil/mp3 player combination - something that our former customers want, but never imagined.

This person will change the industry, and probably put us out of business before we do it to each other. And we will most likely curse him or her as we race away from the pencil factory on our faster horses.