Complementary models: PC Branding
Thanks to the Avis “We Try Harder” campaign, Hertz and Avis now serve as the poster children for the relationship between the #1 and #2 contenders in a market. The “We Try Harder” campaign virtually boasted that Avis wasn’t #1, claiming that they were a better company for it.
It has been demonstrated that leadership position definitely matters: The second place company in a market gets about half the market share as the market leader. The third place company gets about one third as much as the market leader, the fourth place company gets about one fourth as much, and so on. The soundness of this phenomenon can even be demonstrated mathematically.
Nevertheless, when positioned against your competition, fighting to change your market share is not necessarily the most productive use of effort or budget. Typically the best approach is to identify your strengths relative to your competition and focus on those natural assets. Your competitor’s clients will come to you when they need those strengths, as will the rest of the market.
Let the story of Oracle and MySQL demonstrate how this works. Many analysts predicted the demise of MySQL when Oracle bought Sun, with its MySQL technology. However, Oracle management recognized the niche that MySQL dominated and wanted to remain strong in that niche as well. Both products live on, but—rather than compete with itself—Oracle shares development work between the Oracle and MySQL development teams. Indeed, there is really only one database team, with some members developing Oracle Database and other members developing the latest, most competitive version of MySQL. Of course, you can bet that the MySQL team is not going to do anything to rock the boat by stealing Oracle Database share. They each focus on dominating their niches. Once a client is in the Oracle fold with an open source MySQL database, the sales staff can speak of upgrading to Oracle, but even then, the Oracle Database team is not going to try to claim that Oracle Database is as lightweight and sprightly as MySQL. How could it? For now, the Oracle Database team even concedes that MySQL has a better SQL parser, using the former competitor’s parser rather than its own parser.
