Outsmart The MBA Clones

How can you be immensely successful for many years, and yet not be imitated by competitors? Impossible, you say. Not so. Virgin Atlantic, the Body Shop, Apple Computers, and Birkenstock they all achieved this status, and there are ample additional examples. They cracked the secret of successful differentiation that is not imitated and are adored by customers who think that they are incomparable. Dr. Dan Herman calls it an Unfair Competitive Advantage. It's not at all unethical. Everyone has a fair chance of attaining such an advantage including, every reader of this book.

There is a secret to successful differentiation that is not imitated. It is a psychological secret that has to do with the way your competitors think. Most marketers today are MBA graduates who tend to think and operate in typical and predictable ways - you might call them MBA Clones. You can take advantage of their biases and outsmart them. In this groundbreaking book, Dr. Dan Herman not only reveals the secret of successful differentiation that is not imitated but also supplies you with a comprehensive set of practical rules and tools that will enable you to make an unfair advantage your reality.

Dr. Herman, a competitive strategy consultant with vast global experience, a seasoned CMO in a large corporation, a branding professional and a businessman, does not tell you to 'think out of the box' as so many do he provides you with a new and comprehensive toolbox for success.

You'll learn:

• The secret of successful differentiation that is not imitated
• How to scan methodically for both strategic and tactical opportunities for success
• How to integrate a business model, a competitive strategy and a brand concept to create a unitary 'unique success formula' for your company
• How to create marketing hits short meteoric successes
• How to use electrifying marketing, just-on-desire branding and the brand drama approach to build emotionally powerful brands, and many other useful additions to your profit-generating arsenal of concepts and methods.

Using a plethora of examples from top businesses around the world, Dr. Herman offers a business oriented-point of view that is fresh and different, and even humorous at times. Even though this book will turn your thinking inside out, everything in it is practical and easily applicable in any kind of business.

• Part 1
  An alternative understanding of competitive strategy, competitive advantage, and how to achieve it
  1. Introduction: MBA Clones Are All Around You
  • Go with the Flow
  • The MBA Clones
  • Skepticism Pays Off
  • Common Practice or an Unfair Advantage — The Choice is Yours
  2. What is an Unfair Advantage?
  • A Price-Driven Market? There's No Such Thing
  • Double Immunity to Competition
  • Black, Bitter and Exciting
  • Beauty is on the Feet of the Beholder
  • Desire Creates a Monopoly — But What Creates Desire?
  • Loyalty Creates a Monopoly — But What Creates Loyalty?
  • You Need a Strategy
  3. Some Surprising Insights about Strategy
  • Strategy — Very Scary Stuff
  • The 5 Percent That Makes All the Difference
  • A Simultaneous Answer to Two Questions
  • A Goal is Not a Strategy
  • The Strategy is the Brand
  • Strategic Emotions
  • The Unique Success Formula
  4. The Three Myths about Competitive Advantage
  • The Biased Thinking of MBA Clones
  • A Competitive Advantage Isn't Objective
  • Myth No. 1: You have to be better than your competitors
  • Myth No. 2: To succeed, you have to endear yourself to as many consumers as possible
  • Myth No. 3: A Competitive edge exists on a parameter that is considered to be important in the category
  • Their Mistakes are Your Advantage
  5. The Great Secret of Differentiation that No One Imitates
  • Successful Differentiation
  • Virginal Thinking
  • What Are They Waiting For?
  • The Mob and The Mobile
  6. Strategy Development: How Will You Know What's Next?
  • What's Your Vision?
  • The Marketing Approach is Dead: Long Live the Competitive Approach
  • Opportunities Rather than Plans
  • The Strategies of the Past
  • Assumption No. 1: We know where we want to be
  • Assumption No. 2: The world is stable
  • Assumption No. 3: We are the only ones engaged in this process, or we can do it better than others
  • The Strategy of the Future
  • The Future Isn't Here Yet
  • Some Insights into Strategic Thinking
• Part 2
  The O-Scan: Identifying opportunities for success and devising the strategies to maximize them
  7. An Overview of O-Scan: How to Identify, Invent, and Maximize Opportunities
  • What Are We Looking For?
  • Four Satisfactions
  • Creating a Gap
  • Where Should We Look, and How?
  • The Topics We Scrutinize
  • How Do We Pose the Questions?
  • The Strategic Analysis Triangle: A Summary of "What's Now?"
  • Identification of Opportunities
  • Mapping Opportunities
  • What's Feasible?
  • What's Next?
  • Everyday Guidance
  8. Some O-Scan Methods: Obtaining Insights about Consumers and Their Future Desires
  • Start with These Two
  • Contextual Segmentation
  • The New Segmentation
  • The ForeSearch Method
  • How to Conduct ForeSearch — In Brief
  9. Some More O-Scan Methods: Identifying Opportunities Using the Consumption Process Analysis
  • The Consumer: The Ultimate Executor of Your Strategy
  • The 15 Stages
  • 1. Identifying Opportunities to Eliminate Consumers' Pain Points
  • 2. Enriching Consumer Benefits
  • 3. Exposing the Competition's Hidden Rules of the Game
  • An Intoxicating Story
  10. Still More O-Scan Methods: Identifying Opportunities through Self-Analysis and Competitive Analysis
  • Three Strategic Questions
  • Three Levels of Searching
  • Challenging Market Boundaries
  • Substitute Categories
  • Complementary Categories
  • Suppliers and Intermediate Customers
  • Additional Benefits We Can Offer
  • Spotting Opportunities Within the Market
  • 10 Searching Angles
  • Spotting Latent Opportunities In-House
• Part 3
  More tools for managers compelled to "think outside the box": innovative approaches and methods in marketing and branding
  11. Inside Information from the Consumer's Mind
  • The Consumer Test
  • The Gut and the Head
  • Unsatisfied but Driven
  • What Are We Trying to Do?
  • Brands Deliver Benefits
  • Abstract Goals, Specific Satisfactions
  • How Are Beliefs Formed?
  • And Now, Give It More FEEEEELING
  • From Belief to Choice
  • Impulsive Beliefs
  • Beliefs Are Structured
  • Strategy Means Belief Structure
  • Three Layers of Strategy
  12. The Real Reasons for Brand Success
  • About Oranges and about Naïveté
  • How important is the Brand Identity as Such?
  • "Branding" Does Not Create Brands
  • No Relationship, Sorry!
  • On Brands and Anticipations
  • Brands as Instruments
  • The ABCDE of Brand Success
  13. How Do You Create a Brand that is More than the Product?
  • Some Definitions
  • Two Purposes to Branding
  • Who Wants to Live in reality Anyway?
  • Just Do It
  • Instruments for Attaining Intangible Benefits
  14. Satisfying Marketing Vs. Electrifying Marketing
  • Introducing the Consumer You Haven't Met … Yet
  • Some Observations About Consumers and Their Lives
  • Other Needs
  • Going Under
  • A Small and Soft Success
  • Principles of Electrifying Marketing
  15. How Are Marketing Hits Developed?
  • Surprise, Surprise — It's Systematic!
  • The Lifetime Customer
  • The FoMO-Plagued Consumer
  • FoMO is Crunching Loyalty
  • Multi-Satisfiable Recurring Motivations
  • The Cycle of Desire
  • The Psychology of Temptation
  • Some Marketers Are Already Thinking Smart
  • Short-Term Stories
  • Short-Term Brands
  • How is an STB Created?
  • The Marketing Hits Formula
  16. How to Drive Consumers Crazy for Your Brand
  • How Do Consumers Discover a Brand?
  • Leading Them by Their Noses
  • Brand Trance
  • The Principles of Hypnotic Branding
  • The Brand Drama
  • Your Brand's Drama Analysis

Hmmm, it sounds in the title, like this book is geared to people who wants to outsmart me! Thus, making me read it!

To be frank, it is not as suspected, another "MBA in a Box" book, but a presentation of the working model for strategy and marketing (with a focus on Branding). It is interesting to see how another MBA (or rather, PhD) have adopted the stuff you learn in an MBA to match his own needs. Needless to say, it is pretty interesting, except when you wonder where Finance, Operations, HR, IT/IS, Legal, the Sales part of Marketing, Change Management, Knowledge Management, Globalization, Economics, etc, went.

The book is well written, but lacks a depth that would have made it practical. As it is now, it is merely a decent read.