3 Steps to Conquest. How Amazon did it. How Uber did it. How we can do it, too.

3 Steps to Conquering a Market:

         Let’s cut to the chase. There already are volumes of words detailing what founder Jeff Bezos did over at Amazon. Describing what he did to foil the efforts of Borders Books to defend itself – and to survive. And of B. Dalton Booksellers. And other retailers he challenged. And book publishers. And now, in e-commerce, it’s Walmart that Amazon targets with its initiatives. 

     But what’s the bottom line? What is our takeaway?

     Or look at Uber: There are legions of stories in the business media about Uber city by city, country by country, taking on local competitors and dominating the market. And recently, about Uber’s fortifying moats around its market share with mountains of cash as up-and-coming rival Lyft tries to challenge Uber's global domination. 

We know what CEO Jeff Bezos did at Amazon. 

We know what CEO Travis Kalanick did at Uber. 

     That’s the what – or part of the what. 

     What does it mean? 

     Is there a secret? Is it a secret strategy? A secret tactic? Or weapon?

     Can any business, large or small, start-up or established, copy it? Use it? Learn from it? Prevail with it?

     Is there a lesson here? What is the lesson? 

3 Steps to Market Conquest: 

What the big dogs do:

1: They take the initiative. 

2: They keep the initiative. 

(And if you don’t want your grip on the initiative to weaken, you increase the tension in your market space – Lewis Rosenstiel at Schenley knew this. Coca-Cola knew this. Procter & Gamble knew this.) 

     Having the initiative means you are able to create threats faster than your competitor.

     For a technology business, fighting for the initiative means always striving to be ahead in a race to market. (Where there's a race to market, the speed of market entry for a new product even eclipses the initial quality of the product. Like Bill Gates with Microsoft’s first incarnation of Windows, you act, you don’t wait. Because at inflection points in the industry, important positions must be staked out at once.) 

      Companies like Amazon and Uber use their initiative. 

      And what that means – what that essentially means – is simply this. 

In their market space: 

3. They create threats faster than their competitors can. 

         An initiative successfully followed up can grow into a targeted market offensive: an attack. 

          As in life, so in business. In life, you don’t ask – you don’t get. 

In competition, you don’t attack – you don’t get.

        The bottom line is, to survive competitively and to win:

You create market challenges

and threats

faster than your competitor.