8 Ways to Defend your Brand Against Copycats (Part 2)
Hey! 👋 Thanks for reading my work! It means more than you know.
Before I dig in I want to share that I am considering adding a premium tier to this newsletter. I do this mainly as a hobby on but I’m curious if it could be more than that. I considered ads but I think managing that would take time away from the writing (also, that’s not really my style).
To be honest, I don’t know quite yet what a premium tier would look like except that some future and past articles would be accessible to premium subscribers only.
I’m undecided if that is where I want to take this but if you think that is something you would be interested in I’d love to know! You can let me know by clicking the button below and pledging your support. This doesn’t charge you, it just tells me that you think my writing is worth something and you would be interested in more of it. Thanks!
Ok, now let’s dig in!
In my last post I walked through 4 ways brands can defend themselves against copycats and in this one I’m going to cover four more. If you missed the last post you can find it here. As a recap I’m calling each of these a defense mechanism and each one can either prevent copying or make copying irrelevant because it helps you maintain your profits. Some even do both.
The last four defense mechanisms I will cover here are:
The Symphony
Scrambled Eggs
Golden Goose
The Grandparents
#5 The Symphony
The Symphony defense unlocks the power of coordination. How does coordination act as a defense?
Think of it this way, which song is harder to replicate? A five-note melody on the piano or a symphony performed by an orchestra? The answer is of course the symphony. The complexity and coordination of effort a symphony requires makes it difficult to replicate. A lot of things have to be in place for a symphony to be created. Musicians have to learn the music, instruments need to be tuned, a venue secured, etc. Now compare that to the 5-note melody. All you need is a piano, one person and a little time to learn the tune.
The number of elements required to create something, the harder it is to replicate. That is the foundation of the symphony defense.
So, how do you create a symphony in CPG?
First, you need to know your job-to-be-done. The job-to-be-done is the piece of music everyone needs to play. I walk through jobs-to-be-done in this post, but to keep this article short you can think of a job-to-be-done as what a customer hires your product to do for them. It is a specific outcome a customer desires in a specific context. For example the job-to-be-done for a salad dressing brand might be:
When I am on a Paleo diet and want to have a salad, I want a dressing that is convenient, tastes good, doesn’t cost too much and makes me feel healthy.
Do you see how that is a specific outcome in a specific context? That is a job-to-be-done.
After you have your clear job-to-be-done (aka your music), the next step is to coordinate all business team members and effort to help customers get this job done. I'm not talking about lip-service coordination, the kind where you make a product and each department goes through the motions to “support” that product.
I'm talking about viewing the whole customer experience as a product itself. In this scenario, marketing, supply chain, finance, customer support, sales, etc. know the job-to-be-done and are looking for ways to tailor their work to help the customer achieve the job-to-be-done. They are also making sure they don’t do things to sabotage the job-to-be-done. Good brands have someone focused on the product experience, defensible brands have everyone focused on it.
I'm talking about viewing the whole customer experience as a product itself.
In the salad dressing example above, you can easily see a situation where the brand manager or CEO definitely knows the job to be done but the supply chain team, in an effort to be a good supply chain team, sources an ingredient for the formula that is cheaper but also makes the dressing thicker and consequently difficult to get out of the bottle. This kills the job-to-be-done and the lack of coordination leaves an open door to copycats.
The opposite, which would be a supply chain team that is obsessively focused on the job-to-be-done creates a coordination bond that would-be competitors have to replicate to offer the same as you.
Visually a non-coordinated, undefended business looks like this:
Notice the simplicity of such a brand. What you should see is a business that is easy to copy.
Now look at this brand using a symphony defense:
Coordinated effort not only creates more value for the customer, it is also harder to copy. This kind of business is a work of art. That’s the whole idea behind a symphony defense—to create a business so in sync, it is like music.
#6 Scrambled Eggs
This defense is all about switching costs. As they say, you can't unscramble scrambled eggs. Once you've done that scrambling, you are committed. You can, of course, throw the eggs out and start over but, what a waste!
Brands that use the Scrambled Eggs Defense are taking advantage of people’s natural aversion to loss. If a consumer sees some sort of cost associated with quitting your product and jumping to another brand, they are and far less likely to switch, making your competition less relevant. This is Scrambled Eggs Defense.
This Defense method is much more common in general merchandise but there two flavors that seem to work well in CPG:
General merchandise + consumable pairings
High-stakes products