When a new, superior technology or process comes along, early adopters often gain an outsized competitive advantage that isn’t available later.
The introduction of the moving assembly line by the Ford Motor Company reduced the time it took to manufacture an automobile from 12 hours to about 90 minutes, producing enormous cost savings and profits. In financial services, arbitrageurs compete aggressively to gain computing speed advantages of just one or two milliseconds because being faster on a trade can be the difference between it being profitable and missing it altogether. In sports, the early teams to use data had a “moneyball” advantage in evaluating players and signing hidden gems.
But later, when everyone is doing it, that competitive advantage disappears. Laggards are often in the position of having to adopt the newer technologies just to stay in business.
I recently studied the adoption of marketing technology by 351 mid-market B2B companies that operate on a global, or at least national, basis. Specifically I was looking for the use, in even the most minimal manner, of 9 marketing technologies. Each of these 9 technologies has been around for years with, like AdWords, provable ROI.
How regular companies can gain a competitive advantage with marketing technology
