Imagine Rahul Dravid playing like Virender Sehwag in test cricket or one-day internationals. For most of his career, Rahul has been perceived as a batsman who could not play and score fast especially in One-day limited-overs cricket. He tried to change his style initially but failed, he was given the option of wicket keeping as that was the only slot vacant in the team – wicket-keeper – batsman slot. He is one of the few batsmen who have scored 10,000 plus runs in both Test and limited-overs (ODI) cricket. Had he tried to copy some flashy cricketers he might not have been so successful. He stuck to his style and proved everyone wrong.
When a Las Vegas casino had a great degree of success luring Japanese gamblers to its baccarat room, competitors tried to copy what they thought was the reason for the success: They spent millions of dollars building larger and more elaborate baccarat rooms and offered more services to lure these Japanese gamblers. For a short while, the Japanese gamblers visited the rival casinos, but they always came back to the original casino. The competitors became even more frustrated and continued to invest millions more, without any success. The reason that particular casino was successful is that the manager took the time to learn the language and culture of these Japanese gamblers. He was in the best position to understand how they thought and what they wanted. The rival casino businesses could not duplicate this because they had only copied what they could see. This should have served as a warning signal that the rival casinos did not have a sound plan of their own focusing on what they did best.
I remember a few years back when we were launching a product known as Medium Density Fiberboards (MDF) in the Indian market, we came out with some innovative and new-trade methods to generate demand. The demand for MDF was very low in India and most of the users were adverse to use the product. The dealers did not stock or sell the product and to make matters worse our capacity was 50% of the industry size. All other companies were in ‘RED” for almost a decade. Fast forward to 5 years post-launch, we were commissioning our second plant, and the rest of the industry was copying our strategies. They could copy what they saw but could never copy the underlining passion and the “Why” part of our strategy and approach. As a result, most of them could not penetrate the segments we could. Fast forward another 5 years, MDF is a household name and the entire industry has benefitted. Though no longer associated with the product but what we could achieve is what the entire market acknowledges. Had we decided to copy some of the known names and existing players we might not have done what seemed to be impossible at that time.
“Feel happy when people copy you or your strategy because they are the people who help you do better in life and challenge your limits”.
Superb 👍🌹