Win Where Competitors Fail

Reverse benchmarking reveals that the strongest competitive advantage may lie not in copying what rivals do well, but in owning the customer need they all neglect. Every marketing agency in the world will tell you to benchmark the best. Find out who is winning, study what they are doing and apply it to your own business.

The logic is clean: identify best practice, replicate it and improve on it. Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK and one of marketing’s most counterintuitive thinkers, says this is exactly backwards. Sutherland calls his alternative approach reverse benchmarking.

Instead of asking, “What are the best players in this category doing well?” you ask, “What are all the players in this category doing badly?” Then you take that gap, own it completely and build your brand around it. The result, when done correctly, is not a brand that is slightly better than its competitors. It is a brand that is incomparable to them.

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Sutherland tells the story of a research team visiting top-tier restaurants on behalf of a client. The food was excellent. The service was refined.

The wine lists were curated, and the staff were knowledgeable. But when two members of the research party asked for beer instead of wine, something changed. The beer drinkers were handed a short list with minimal explanation and treated, as Sutherland put it, like second-class citizens.

The sommelier’s expertise and careful recommendations evaporated the moment someone chose not to drink wine. The research team’s recommendation was not to improve the already excellent food or wine service. It was to treat beer drinkers with the same care, knowledge and ceremony that the best restaurants reserved for wine.

Introduce a considered beer menu. Train staff to pair craft beers with dishes. Make the beer drinker feel as valued as the wine drinker.

The restaurant did exactly that. It went from number 50 in the world to number 1. The food did not change.

The gap that nobody else had filled did. Here is the counterargument that holds equally true.

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