If you're in a Dogfight Become a Cat Strategies for Long-Term Growth by Leonard Sherman

 If you're in a Dogfigth Become a Cat

Strategies for Long-Term Growth by Leonard Sherman is an important book by Columbia Business School if you started a business but you don't see a lot of profit, if you plan to do that, because it will help you a lot. 

Thanks to examples taken by the most important corporate, from Amazon to Johnson & Johnson, for naming two of them, you will discover how to increase your success, keeping energetic your workplace. Not all business are equals. For example Amazon understood something crucial: they needed to capture as many customers as possible but also, these customers had to stay loyal forever.

Sometimes, writes Sherman, market more than producing different things in grade to make the difference, present us a lof of replicas and customers are lost in supermarkets per hours chosing what they need. 

Originality and a different approach to market can means the difference. 

So, Sherman analyzes... socks. They are boring, and people won't never fall in love for an article like this one, but keeping it interesting, colored, stunningly different, offering more than a pair of socks,differently colored, people can fall in love for them buying that article with more joy and satisfaction.

Wine is not a lot consumed by Americans and American brands didn't have a great success. An Australian brand, thanks to an operation of marketing, in grade to keep the product recognizable in the miriads of other wines that could be seen in American stores, won the US market.

But which are the winning strategies for a continuous growth? Surely treating very well all workers of a corporation, from the first to the latest one, but also, when there is sufficient success, reinvesting in new products, delivering superior customer service. "A good corporation provide jobs, tax revenue and philantropic contribution to the communities in which operate" writes Sherman.

Speaking of large numbers Sherman analyzed the situation of Apple and its future, maybe less competitive than not the one created during the past two decades making a comparison with Amazon and seeing the differences of these corporations and their appraches and choices made for going on.

The pyramid for a certain success can be this one: at the top tactics, then strategy, objectives, and goals.

But...Sure there are brands that make the difference in the market. Brands that, although many other ones could appear to the horizon wouldn't in grade to replace the ones loved so badly. 

It's the case of Nutella, Louis Vuitton  and many other brands chosen for the certainty of the product and the goodness of it.

Plus a consumer when sees a strong brand, musn't search anymore for something else; he/she knows he/she can trust it, buying without difficulty or losing too much time.

Sure, who maintain a brand like this one must be creative, innovative, always surprising, so that consumers will always be stimulated where possible, in buying the products they love a lot from a lifetime.

A consumer of Apple would say that the brand help him to express himself as he wants; the one of Nutella would remakrs that he tried a lot of other brands but that he would continue to choose nutella. Why? "I have been eating Nutella since I was a very young child. It has always meant to me both a memory of my childhood and a fundamental component of my breakfast before doing sport activities."

Interesting the fight of Coke versus Pepsi.co. When Pepsi was born, changing the cards on the table started to be appreciated much more, and Coke tried its best for bettering their secret formula...

Another rampant example the one of Samsung versus Apple, absolutely the biggest competitor.

Where do Great Ideas Come From?  takes in consideration the birth of Post-It Notes as a national and later international reality, but also the errors commited by Walmart the biggest supermarket chains of the USA.

This one is an amazing book! if you love business, but also, to my point of view, if you want to discover much more about the corporation that are moving this old world, the ones that, in general we put with more enthusiasm in our tables, like Coke or Nutella, or we do use in a daily base, as smartphones, cars, post-it notes etc.

Highly recommended.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori