Uncopyable: How to Create an Unfair Advantage Over Your Competition

by Steve Miller

The problem with the hamster-wheel approach is it’s based on becoming better than the competition. But you don’t want to be better, because better can always be bettered, ad infinitum. The only way to climb off of the wheel is by becoming Uncopyable—demonstrably, clearly, undoubtedly, measurably, meaningfully Uncopyable.

In today’s world, if something can be copied, it will be copied.

To be sure, you need to keep an eye on the competition. If someone else does add an improvement such as a curved shower rod, you need to bring your game up a notch too, even if it just means copying. After all, your target market will always base its minimum level of expectation on the best thing being offered in your industry.

“better” is temporary.

competition doesn’t breed innovation. Competition breeds conformity.

When prospective customers cannot differentiate between two products on the basis of performance and quality, they look at the producing companies’ quality of service. If they can’t tell the difference between the companies’ levels of service, they have only one point of differentiation left: price. We don’t want that to happen. We don’t want to compete on price, because that’s a losing battle. So how do you achieve Uncopyable Superiority? What’s the secret code so many companies struggle to break? In a word—attachment: your customer’s attachment to you.

That’s an Uncopyable Mind-Set: looking at something everybody else sees but seeing something different. Oftentimes, in my own interviews, I’ll be asked to synopsize all this into a sound bite. My reply is, “Look at what everybody else is doing and don’t do it.”

And don’t fall into the trap of thinking you can just ask your customers what they want that’s different. I guarantee Lin-Manuel Miranda didn’t do that. Your customers don’t know what they want. They know they want something better—but not different. Nobody asked for an eight-track tape player. Nobody asked for a cell phone, let alone a smart phone. Nobody asked for the Internet. Nobody asked for social media. Nobody asked for Amazon.com. My all-time favorite quote about this came from Henry Ford: “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

The first McDonald’s drive-through was created in 1975, near an Arizona military base, to serve soldiers who weren’t permitted to get out of their cars while wearing fatigues. The manager of the Fort Huachuca McDonald’s was befuddled by the loss of potential business, so he looked for an answer. While sitting at his bank’s drive-through window, the solution hit him. If money could be passed through a window, so could food! The first fast-food, drive-through window was created. Nowadays, between 50 and 70 percent of all sales are through the drive-through.8 This is an example of what I call Stealing Genius™.

Southwest Airlines founder Herb Kelleher. He had an outsized, “out-there” personality, and he loved doing big promotional stunts—the goofier the better. Once, when another company threatened to sue the airline for a copyright infringement because it used the phrase “Just Plane Smart” in its advertising, Kelleher challenged the owner of that other small business to an arm-wrestling match. He proposed they put up a substantial amount of money to go to the winner’s choice of charities, and the winner also would get the right to the slogan. Mind you, Kelleher was in his sixties at the time, and the other guy was in his thirties and athletic, so Kelleher had no chance to beat this guy, but the publicity this idea generated was great for both of them. They had this quasi-wrestling match dubbed “Malice in Dallas” in front of a whole bunch of people, and they declared it a tie, agreeing both could use the slogan and the money would go to the Muscular Dystrophy Association and Ronald McDonald House of Cleveland.

I learned that success attracts attention! That’s the nature of the beast. If it can be copied and appears successful, it will be copied.