Get Disruptive: A Bold Strategy for Taking Down Your Big Competitors

Go big or go home. Method founders Adam Lowry and Eric Ryan saw a way to turn their company’s smaller size into a disruptive competitive advantage. With these five secrets to their success, so can you.

Editor’s note: All month long we’re featuring stories of small businesses that turned the tables on their market Goliaths. We learned how Yammer used its size as a competitive advantage, and now Nick Petri reveals the bold strategy Method used to break into an industry dominated by three firmly entrenched giants.
Outside of a few small brands and some made-for-TV solutions, the multi-billion dollar cleaning products industry is mostly dominated by three giants: Proctor & Gamble, Unilever, and Colgate-Palmolive. And challenging those corporate behemoths (and their marketing budgets) is something that very few entrepreneurs have seemed willing to do.
Except, of course, Adam Lowry and Eric Ryan.
In 2000, the two childhood friends recognized that the Goliaths of the cleaning products market hadn’t yet capitalized on a couple of key cultural shifts: the global movement toward greener, more environmentally safe products, and consumers’ deeper appreciation of elegant design.

Method to the Madness: Disrupting the Market

So, in 2001, Lowry and Ryan decided to disrupt a market that seemed impenetrable, founding Method Home, a manufacturer of environmentally safe home cleaning products with eye-catching packaging designs. By 2006, the company had climbed to 7th on Inc’s list of fastest growing companies, and in late 2012 Method was acquired by European cleaning products manufacturer Ecover. Today, Method is a globally recognized brand that, while still dwarfed by giants like P&G and Unilever, is a legitimate player in the household cleaning products industry.
So, how did Lowry, Ryan, and the Method team pull it off?
The company’s success can be contributed to a number of factors, but there’s little doubt that Method’s commitment to differentiating itself in a very vanilla industry played a significant role. In particular, because of its size and nimbleness, Method was able to leverage a key competitive advantage of being small: Scope.

How Method Used its Scope Advantage to Outmaneuver Industry Behemoths

When Lowry and Ryan founded Method, P&G, Unilever, and other cleaning product behemoths had become lazy – emboldened by their brand reputation and relationships with big box retailers. Their products were similar, their packaging and design was bland, and their key differentiators were generally obscure.
Method carved out a specialty market that was largely unaddressed by the largest competitors in the industry (either because those Goliaths viewed the niche as not being worth the chase, or because they couldn’t justify the cost of addressing it).
And while it wasn’t exactly easy being the little guy in the market, Method’s size was arguably its biggest advantage.
As Stephen Denny writes in his book, Killing Giants: 10 Strategies to Topple the Goliath in Your Industry, Method could afford to shake things up and be bold. The company used different ingredients, designed unique packaging, and focused solely on its niche buyers.
As a result, the company could focus on a few very specific goals or customer needs, and be faster and nimbler than its bigger competitors when it came to branding itself around those things.

5 Ways to Leverage Your Scope Advantage

What happens when you take a magnifying glass and focus the sun’s energy on a single small spot on the ground? The spot burns.
The same fundamental principal applies to the way companies leverage their internal focus, talents, and resources. If they pool their energy and apply it to a small focal point, the energy around that focal point intensifies. Of course, the key word in that previous sentence is small. And it’s important for them to make absolutely sure it’s the right spot, as well.
Just as Method was able to clearly identify its industry’s unaddressed focal point, here are five ways you can ensure you’re aiming your magnifying glass at the right target opportunity:

1. Focus on a small niche product market: Target the specific needs (pain points, tastes, and scenarios) of specific customer types or personas in a specific market using a specific distribution approach.
2. Train the energy of the entire company on your chosen niche: Get everyone in the company focused on delivering to your niche, and only that niche. The activities you need to get focused on include product, marketing, distribution, and customer service.
3. Develop a true sense of urgency: Make sure each employee is primarily focused on 2-4 major activities that will have the biggest impact. The company as a whole needs to focus, each group needs to focus, and each individual needs to focus. Doing so takes management time and attention, but it works.
4. Set up your company with as small a staff as possible: A small staff of truly A-caliber people will allow you to focus your and their time much better than a large staff. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t hire for positions you really need, just that you are better off with as few people as possible.
5. Make sure that all management systems reinforce the focus: The focus should be tied into everything — corporate/department goals, plans, resource approval processes, reports, staff meetings, compensation systems, etc. This is an extremely important point because everyone in your company has ideas they want to pursue that are not necessarily aligned with your focal point.

The core message here — and it’s one that Method obviously understood — is that pushing your team and the company’s resources toward one main focal point is critical when you’re competing against a market full of Goliaths.

We want to hear from you!

What is the most crucial thing small companies need to focus on in order to topple larger competitors in their market?