Outsmart the MBA Clones: The Alternative Guide to Competitive Strategy, Marketing, and Branding

Citation

Lakotta, A.J. (2010), "Outsmart the MBA Clones: The Alternative Guide to Competitive Strategy, Marketing, and Branding", Journal of Product & Brand Management, Vol. 19 No. 3, pp. 234-235. https://doi.org/10.1108/10610421011046229

Dan Herman's Outsmart the MBA Clones is, at first glance, an easy‐to‐read guide for entrepreneurs on how to be successful in any given market. More specifically, Herman claims that if “you use the tools that [this book] offers, in five years you'll be very wealthy“ (p. 1). This is made possible with the “new approach to achieving growth and a competitive advantage, complemented by a new method for developing and managing brands [by offering] you fresh concepts that enable you to view reality in a new light and discover new directions for action“ (pp. 2‐3). What do these new approaches/methods/concepts entail? Herman stresses, that in order to be successful as an entrepreneur, one needs:

To achieve an unfair advantage over your competitors. You create this unfair advantage because you are not competing in the same way your competitors are. An unfair advantage will pull you out of the rat race. You'll be safe from the competition and your competitors will become much less relevant. In some cases, you will even be able to create your own private monopoly (p. 6).

Herman builds up significant expectations. The question is: does the book deliver on these promises? Not entirely.

The book is divided into three parts, each containing four to six subchapters. The table of contents gives no indication as to what Herman's message is. Patience and imagination are necessary in the quest for a common theme both within and between the three parts. The vagueness of the introduction is a good indicator of what is to follow. It seems that the author hopes to explain everything that impacts the profitability of a firm in less than 300 pages – a risky endeavor.

I will briefly outline the contents of the first two subchapters of the first part and provide some remarks to the remaining two parts, before offering a short synopsis.

Part 1 is entitled, “An alternative understanding of competitive strategy, competitive advantage, and how to achieve it.” Herman attempts to lay the basis of his book with an explanation of the functioning of markets.

Herman's introduction in chapter 1 (“MBA clones are all around you”) is little more than a pitch for the book, an attempt to grab the reader's attention. The message is simply that a successful entrepreneur must look at markets differently than his/her competitors do. According to Herman, this requires abandoning the “marketing gurus” such as Porter, Kotler, Aaker, and Ries, to which competitors adhere, and their supposedly narrow‐minded understanding of the functioning of markets and brands.

In chapter 2 (“What is an unfair advantage?”) Herman introduces the idea that there are no price‐driven markets. It remains unclear what this elaboration adds to the initial question. Herman uses company cases to support his hypothesis. The cases are meant to show that consumers connect to certain brands more than to others by developing a personal relationship with them. However, in the following section Herman declares that such a thing as consumer loyalty is “rare.” He goes so far as to say that, “[e]ven lower‐level loyalty is rapidly nearing extinction” (p. 16). This statement is astonishing, given the broad evidence in academic research of the importance of relationship marketing. While the author promises to expand on the topic in a later chapter, further discussion is no more specific but, rather, anecdotal. Indeed, the application of real‐world examples is very contestable. After this short excursus, the following section stresses the importance of loyalty, which seems contradictory to his previous hypothesis. In sum, by the end of the chapter, it remains unclear how the unfair competitive advantage described is different from that of Porter.

In part 2 the author proposes the “O‐Scan,” a tool for increasing profitability. However, such a panacea seems highly unrealistic in the complex world. Part 3 discusses how to create marketing hits; a logical flow is not recognizable.

The reviewer did not bother to read this book in its entirety. Instead, time and again, he flipped to a new page or chapter in order to give the book another chance. Yet, the author consistently produces banal or completely unsubstantiated arguments, coupled with ignorance and arrogance vis‐à‐vis existing marketing knowledge.

More precisely, Herman fails to substantiate most of his arguments, whether with sources or specific and convincing examples. It seems that the weakness of the arguments is to be compensated by the boldness and speed of new arguments that hopelessly try to challenge conventional wisdom. The pace at which new hypotheses are introduced allows little opportunity for critical reflection on the part of the reader. However, it is clear that most of the arguments are not convincing; especially since the writing style itself oftentimes defies any logic. Thus, with every new pseudo‐argument, the “dialogue” between author and reader is interrupted. Clearly, from an academic perspective this book is not acceptable. The author does not lend the slightest concern to logical and well‐grounded reasoning. The author employs statements which are not falsifiable; in Popper's words, the statements are epistemologically worthless.

But let us give this book a chance from a practitioner's standpoint. A positive aspect is that the author uses plain language, making each individual sentence easy to read. Still, it remains nearly impossible to draw conclusions out of the sections, due mainly to the abundance of pseudo‐arguments that have no connection to one another. This renders the very purpose of this book as questionable. Herman's oeuvre is not suitable for newcomers to the field of marketing, for it is too unstructured and no underlying rationale is discernable. Nor is it suitable for seasoned entrepreneurs, for it masks unfounded, commonplace statements as truth.

Overall, the semi‐knowledge that the author employs is apparent; for example, Herman does not refrain from developing his own models, such as ones on buying behavior, without any reference to the extant body of knowledge or substantiating argumentation. The book is regressive in terms of logical reasoning. It is the opinion of the reviewer that semi‐knowledge is even more dangerous than false knowledge, because it discredits existing knowledge and compromises the readers' ability to think critically:

A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again (Alexander Pope (1688‐1744) in An Essay on Criticism, 1709).