Customer Reviews

Outsmart the MBA Clones: The Alternative Guide to Competitive Strategy, Marketing and Branding

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Masters degrees in Business Administration (MBA) are not only being taught in elite schools, but in nearly every university, college, and diploma mill that can find some way to get accreditation. Most of the programs teach their students similar concepts in the core subjects of Financial and Management Accounting, Finance, Economics, Statistics, Operations, Organizational Behavior, Information Systems, Marketing and Corporate Strategy. If everyone has the same tools and book of tactics, including how to differentiate your company and create a competitive advantage, how can you actually compete and win in the real world? Worse, these kinds of programs train these managers to work, think, and fit in to the large companies that hire MBAs by the campusfull. That is why this book refers to MBA Clones and provides an approach that takes a different tack than standard MBA thinking would see.

It isn't that what you learn as an MBA isn't valuable, it's that learning the core of a business program provides you with only a basic toolset. You still need to learn to apply them. However, if you apply them like everyone else (the problem with `best practices') you aren't creating a compelling advantage. The best business folks are artists and use their toolsets in powerfully creative ways to win in the marketplace.

Dan Herman is a Ph.D. and CEO (and co-owner) of Competitive Advantages Ltd. Through which he and his team serve companies all around the world. Their goal is to help their clients identify growth opportunities and creating `unfair' competitive advantages. Along with this Advantagizing they help create powerful and compelling brands and profitable business models.

In part 1 of this book provides a look at what Herman's views on some common myths of Competitive Advantage (that you have to be better than your competitors, that you have to endear yourself to as many customers as possible, and that your competitive edge is to be found on a parameter that is important in your business category. He then provides a secret to Differentiation and uses examples from Virgin, Google, Starbucks and others to show you what he is after.

Part 2 explains their O-Scan (opportunity scan) method. It is about identifying insights about customers and what they are GOING to want (rather than what they are demanding today). You also learn to use a customers 15 stage consumption process to find points of pain and opportunity, to provide more consumer benefits, and seeing the hidden rules your competitors are using to win.

Part 3 is provides Herman's views of Branding. First you have to understand the consumer's mind. I found this discussion of how the consumer experiences things, what they are trying to do, and how they for their beliefs to be quite interesting. Herman also rejects the idea that Branding creates brands. He says that it is the real success factors that you have identified previously that will provide substance and power to your brand. He provides the ABCDE of Brand Success: Attribution of benefit, Believability, Craving, Differentiation, and Ease of acting upon their desire.

For Herman, brands are more about expectations, anticipations, and dreams that take them out of their hum-drum reality. It is about adventure, temptations, testing limits, nostalgia, and much more. The goal is to make your marketing electrifying to your customers. He also provides interesting chapters on developing marketing hits and how you can drive your consumers crazy about your brand.

Is all this absolutely original and unique? Look, I have an MBA from the University of Michigan Business School and what he says here is consistent with what I learned there. The expectation I had upon graduation was to use what I learned creatively. What Herman does is help those interested in turning the toolkit you were given into a weapons system. And I think that is very worthwhile.

Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI

This book, which I was privileged to read as a review copy of the publisher, contains a totally new approach to marketing, one that is not taught in business schools, one that is geared to today's changed consumer environment. For example, to read the author's description of the Joe Boxer phenomenon is for old fogies like me to have a lightbulb on the culture suddenly turn on.

The book is full of extraordinary insights. A true page-turner, I highly recommend it.

Long-term strategies have been replaced by ones that adapt and change as opportunities are identified.

"Launch and forget" brands today, such as Marboro, are rare. They have been replaced by visual identities and advertising styles that change rapidly. To succeed over the long-term managements must succeed in the short-term time after time.

Dan Herman, citing observations from Copernicus Marketing Consulting, argues brands are becoming like commodities. Consumers can no longer differentiate them from sugar, corn or cement. They are created by marketers who employ the same data, the same focus groups and data analysis. The marketers have become indistinguishable.

In this new environment, Herman observes:

1. Porter, Kotler, Aaker and Ries and their rules are obsolete.
2. Marketers need to understand nature's rules. They need to be able to devise alternatives paths to the same goals.
3. Theoretical concepts are tools for thinking about reality. They are not reality itself.

If you are a seasoned marketer, this book is different from another you have read. Herman's fresh thinking about competitive advantage, marketing, customer segmentation, differentiation and branding will challenge your thinking. It is worth every penny of its cover price.

"Outsmart the MBA Clones" by Dan Herman should definitely be considered as a textbook for business programs. This book uses real-life recent examples of companies, products, and services we know, explains how their creative innovations worked, and how some were imitated. Many companies and their products provide examples throughout this book. Starbucks, Google, Tower Records, Virgin, RIM's BlackBerry, etc. The days of Marlboro Man ads that go on year after year without adapting, are over.

Most businesses are more similar than different. I'll go as far to say, they're basically the same.

Not to be negative towards MBA programs, but many programs produce sheep. They are educational *institutions.* Mills. Fair enough. The knowledge and skills attained in these programs are needed and these courses often focus on graduates entering positions in established companies. Outsmart the Clones can enable you to be more innovative, adaptable, and think outside of the box. It's about tomorrow, not just today.

Successful concepts and products can often, but not always, be mimicked. Today, there are often multiple brands competing for consumers in the same market niche. Herman notes the "Commoditization of Brands," where products are so similar consumers have trouble telling them apart. Obviously, once an idea or item that's copyable is produced, many others will duplicate and follow.

There are sixteen chapters and three parts in Clones: 1) The debunking of Competitive Advantage. Today the focus should be on *Renewable* Competitive Advantage 2) O-scan, which focus on what customer will consume in the future 3) Branding.

The benefit of this book is that you don't have to be in marketing, advertising, or management to benefit from it. There are also good quality illustrations, throughout.

One concept noted by Herman is about the consumer (us humans), stated on page 243: "consumers live their lives, and in the frame of everything they do and go through they are constantly on the lookout for new opportunities to improve their existence. They search for solution to their problems, ways to prevent unwanted situations and experiences, opportunities to develop, improve, and advance themselves and their circumstances, and chances to have fun and enjoy live with their loved ones."

Great point. And, a great book.

This is a five-star book. Amazon won't let us change the stars. I realized I was imposing my ethics in taking away one star. For what it seeks to do, this is a five-star book.

This is a well-written book, ably illustrated, that is easy to read and appreciate. A few flyleaf notes:

+ Real-time branding, leveraging opportunities instead of plans

+ Accelerated world, focus on customer psyche

+ Price is NOT a strategic obstacle or advantage

+ Differentiation is everything (at the 5% level)

+ Promotional campaigns of dubious value

+ Good management is not strategy

+ Market research flawed for its focus on aggregate (group) statistics instead of psychology of the individual consumer

+ Vision plus values can make a difference

+ Identify, Invent, Implement

+ Stellar use of examples through-out the book

+ Opportunity scan: content, consumers, market, competitors, us (from outer circle to inner sweet spot)

+ Very useful and thoughtful lists, easy to understand and reflect upon

+ 15 stages of consumption within which differentiation can occur

+ Loyalty bankruptcy a challenge

+ Hypnotic branding and Fear of Missing Out both can be leveraged

Although I am a long-term strategist and focused on saving the Earth for my three boys and future generations, there is no question but that this book is the gold standard in short-term branding and market exploitation for short-term profit. It was worth my while.

Other books of possible interest:
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism
Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage
The Philosophy of Sustainable Design
Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons (Bk Currents)
The Ecology of Commerce
Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming

First, let me tell you who this book is for. It's not just for MBAs or managers or CEOs or people in large companies. The title might lead you to think that. Not so. This book is for anyone who is in business, large In order to create a differentiation that won't be imitated, you have
to think beyond the core benefits that are already (or even potentially)
considered important in your market. It works time after time. The
companies that have succeeded in maintaining their differentiation
over the years and weren't imitated, even though they were making
tremendous profits, are those whose innovations went beyond the core
benefits of their marketor small. And it especially concerns itself with marketing.

Let me give you an example of what you'll find in this fantastic new book.

"Successful differentiation has two defining characteristics: (1) it is
not imitated by your competitors, even though (2) it brings you unmis-
takable success with consumers. Impossible, you say? Not really. I am
about to reveal to you the unexpectedly simple and wonderful secret
of successful differentiation. Here it is: do not look for it among the
core benefits of your product category; rather, think off-core differ-
entiation."

Then Herman does just that. He tells you how to differ from your competitor and do it in a manner that your competitor can't or won't imitate. Amazing stuff!

He says, "Many companies have learned this the hard way.
Tower Records created a differentiation for itself with a great
core benefit. It enabled its music customers to listen to the music they
were thinking about buying. "A great idea!" said Virgin Megastores
and copied them without even blinking an eye. Today, you'll find this
service in all music stores.

Starbucks thought its coffee shops would be cozier and look
more like a neighborhood hangout if the seats weren't identical and
if some easy chairs and sofas were scattered around. What a great
idea! Today, you'll find this type of seating in many coffee shops
around the world."

So what do you do if these things don't work?

"In order to create a differentiation that won't be imitated, you have
to think beyond the core benefits that are already (or even potentially)
considered important in your market. It works time after time. The
companies that have succeeded in maintaining their differentiation
over the years and weren't imitated, even though they were making
tremendous profits, are those whose innovations went beyond the core
benefits of their market."

OK. I won't give away any more of this valuable book. I encourage you to read it yourself.

Most business books are pretty much the same. I was very surprised. But, I shouldn't have been. After all, this is the master or how NOT to be a clone. So why would the book be a clone?

This is a revolutionary book with such valuable ideas and information that it really will give you the unfair advantage. I know it has given me the unfair advantage. I put it right to work.

Herman says that all of us in business read the same things and, in general, do the same things. Thus, we get to about the same place. To wit, we're clones.

So we must outsmart the clones and this book gives us the tools that we don't learn in school or books or the many ebooks we can buy online. This is a one-of-a-kind book and I highly recommend it.

I am afraid that I have been dilatory in reading and reviewing this book. At the time of the offer, I appreciated the chance to read the text. It sounded like something that I would like and I always enjoy discovering a new author. Unfortunately, I went through a bad place where I started to hate all business books. I had the feeling that everything I read was more or less the same. I also started to feel as though most business books begin with a single good idea. Sometimes the exploration of that idea is worth an entire book. Mostly, however, I had the feeling that I was reading a puffed-up magazine article.

I was very pleasantly surprised by Dr. Herman's book. I found it smart (maybe because I intuitively agreed with many of his ideas) and quite readable. There is a nice assortment of exercises, ideas and examples that flow together well. I found it useful to gain insight into the success of my own company's brand.

Best of all, I found that it earned its 253 pages. There was very little puffery, if any.

I would recommend it to others who are looking to build or develop their business. Well done. The best business book that I have read in a while.

Dan Herman's book is not really about M.B.A.s; it's just badly titled. Actually, his subject is the continuing power of product differentiation, and he is challenging how marketers conceptualize their work. He explains how to "electrify" consumers by developing innovative products and services that your "M.B.A.-clone" competitors are reluctant to imitate, thereby handing you a monopoly. Herman comes out swinging as a bold strategist, but because his thinking is both nuanced and complex, his book is sometimes difficult to follow. Still, getAbstract considers it a useful text in marketing strategy and recommends it to marketers of all stripes. Even if you decide not to follow Herman's logic down all its paths, you can harness his clever ideas and out-market all those M.B.A. clones.

The best way to describe this book is to think about a lawyer arguing a case before a court and presenting a novel argument with no primary authority or evidence to support it. While the argument may sound good, it is unlikely a court would disturb established precedent in order to adopt such a novel argument. This is precisely what the author Dan Herman is asking of the reader, to adopt his novel arguments on marketing, while discarding established marketing precedent.

In disposing of what Herman believes to be outdated principles of marketing, he introduces his own "new terms," so that he gets you into his movie, so to speak.

Throughout the book, Herman attempts to draw comparisons of his system to a variety of successfully marketed products and companies, none of which are based on his system. Also, there are no footnotes linking any evidence or studies to support any of his theories. Herman does say, however, that "This isn't a textbook, so I'm not going into precisely what each term means and how we research and analyze each and every topic." In effect, Herman is asking the reader to adopt his theories, while disposing of established marketing principles, which he contends no longer work, a tall order to say the least.

The book is well written and has its moments, yet falls short in establishing any evidence to support this supposedly improved marketing system, over that of the principles being used by MBA clones. Since the book introduces so many new terms, it could benefit from adding a summary at the end of each chapter, tying in those key points and terms.

In short, the book boils down to a series of novel arguments. Whether they work in the dynamic world of marketing is anyone's guess, since the author is defining the scope of that success with a variety of his own new terms and ideas, which have yet to be adopted or proven.