Send A Secret Message To Your Competition
Our actions have innumerable unintended consequences. We often don’t realize or acknowledge these consequences, but within them, we have an opportunity to act invisibly and influentially. If we think about our actions, then we can send out hidden messages and cause other players in our game to adjust their behavior.
This as stratagem 28: point at the mulberry but curse the locust.
Here’s how the stratagem works: Rather than attack your adversary directly, focus your attention on a different target. This action sends a covert message to your adversary, one that displays your power and communicates your intention. Your adversary, appreciating your power and intention, alters his behavior.
This ancient stratagem even applies today. Corporations use this tactic to bring competitors into alignment. Right now Apple is using this approach with its recent lawsuit against HTC, the Taiwanese company that is the largest maker of smartphones running Google’s Android operating system.
On the surface, it seems Apple is suing HTC because of patent infringements. But many believe this lawsuit has more to do with sending a message to Google.
For years Apple has been the leader in smartphones with its iPhone. Google’s operating system, Android, has similar functions and capabilities to Apple’s iPhone, and Google gives away the Android system to phone manufactures. That depletes the uniqueness of Apple’s products and cuts into Apple’s market share.
Last year, HTC, among other phone makers, started making phones using the Android system. This has offered consumers quite a good substitute to the pricey iPhone and AT&T service contract.
By attacking HTC, Apple warns Google to stay off its turf. This may only be the first attack in a long conflict between the two companies. Only time, and lawsuit outcomes, will tell if this stratagem will be successful for Apple. But it’s a great example of how to secretly send a message to competitors.
Knowing that our actions send different signals to different players, we can choose our actions for the broader messages they send. This gives us a powerful tool with which to influence our environments. Ask yourself the questions below to see if you can use this approach to send the right messages.
- Who is our biggest competitor?
- Who do we want to convince that we are serious about pursuing our vision or defending our market share?
- Instead of approaching this player directly, who can we focus our attention on to spread our message?
- Is there a smaller competitor or new service that we can partner with to show our other competitor our intentions?
