Somebody's Got To Be First

Despite the fact that one of the main principals of Big Red Moose’s brother is a Cumbrian hill farmer, as a rule, we don’t like sheep. I’ll expand, lest we’re befriended by too many vegans or have the RSPCA banging on our door: we don’t like to follow the crowd – no kidding, they chorused – any more than we like our clients blithely to follow whatever marketing fad is flavour of the month at the moment.

I’ll admit, it takes a certain nutter to think that going over Niagara Falls in a barrel could be a great idea, but someone was the first to do it, and whether anyone else was daft enough to follow him (I’ll be politically correct now: yes, it was a man), you have to give him respect for having the courage to do it in the first place. The Wright Brothers were pretty ballsy too; they’d only built bicycles before. You can’t accuse them of being sheep. Any more than you could Tim Berners-Lee, the Brit – yes, you lot in the land of the free, a Brit – who ‘invented’ the World Wide Web. But that’s the point, really; somebody has to be the first to do stuff.

The Internet luvvies, before the bursting of ‘The Dot Com Bubble’ had an expression called ‘First Mover Advantage’. This was the suggestion that any individual or organisation who was first to pioneer a new type of website, or any online activity for that matter, had an edge – provided they told the rest of humanity about it and yes, that involved marketing - over those that followed; the sheep, as it were.

Obviously, we’re not suggesting that metaphorically you put your budget in a barrel and lob it over a cataract, but we are suggesting that you don’t plan your marketing around your competitors’ activity. Just because your competition is doing something, it doesn’t mean they are right any more than they are making the best of their budget.