First-mover advantage
So before I get into anything, the inspiration for this article came to me from the recently held elections in Goa. (No this article doesn’t have anything to do with politics)
To those of you who don’t know what happened, the party with the majority, the NCP, (17 seats) needed to convince 4 more candidates to join them to get a clear majority and form the government. Which seemed to be inevitable given the fact that the second highest single party the BJP got 13 seats which meant they needed to convince 8 more candidates.
It was mission impossible, yet that’s exactly what happened.
Today the citizens of the state are divided in opinion. Me I don’t really know what the whole fuss is about. The way I see it, one party acted faster than the other. Which got me thinking, is this a case of first-mover advantage to the BJP as they acted first?
According to Wikipidea, in marketing strategy, first- mover advantage, or FMA, is the advantage gained by the initial (" first-moving") significant occupant of a market segment.
I believe, as do many marketers, this first-mover advantage plays a big role in the success of any product or service. However going back to what I started this article with. If I use the Goa elections as an example, who would you say had the first mover advantage, The NCP that lost or the BJP that made an amazing comeback?
Let me put it to you this way, NCP technically already had the first mover advantage as their campaigning seemed to have worked, getting 17 seats and all. However for whatever reason, the other candidates and parties decided to form a coalition government with the BJP.
So you could just say that NCP were sitting on their laurels and the BJP took advantage, and it actually was that way. So what happened to the NCP’s first mover advantage?
Well let’s move away from the politics. There are numerous instances where companies or brands have relied on the first mover advantage and failed. The reason for that is simple. They were lazy, or simply satisfied with what they had achieved. it’s like the old tortoise and the hare story.
Let me give you another example which is quite important in today’s world. Most of us would know what amazon.com is, and some of us know that amazon.com started out as an online retail store for books and has now branched out to sell practically everything and anything under the sun.
But what most of us don’t know is that they weren’t the first online store to sell books. It was Book Stacks Unlimited or books.com, founded in 1991, and launched online in 1992.
Amazon.com was founded in 1994
You may say this is obvious that you can’t simply rely on FMA. So then why is it that so many companies fail using it. I have, and I am certain many of you have worked on projects where you are rushed into something simply to cross the finish line first and after that things start to fall apart. Therein lies the problem. Most of these projects are just focused on getting started or being the first, with vague ideas of how everything will fall in place afterwards. The target becomes the launch and doing it first.
FMA is not the finish line, FMA is the starting point. As managers we tend to forget this, we are blinded by the beauty of the birth of our child in this case the project/product and we don’t really think it through, we don’t really think about how to nurture it and sometimes, even if we need it at that point in time.
It’s important that you don’t start to do something just because the sole reason is that no one else has done it and you will be the so called pioneer. I mean think about it. You must have met a lot of people who were pioneers of some really dumb shit.
It’s the great ideas that matter and most of the time they are the simplest of things.