I am a big fan of the Mixed Martial Arts sport. The MMA is a modern day Gladiator sport which combines amazing power, speed skill and techniques of martial arts and game strategy. A few days back I was watching a behind the scene interview between a gigantic monster called Kimbo Slice (Believe me, he has nothing to do with Mangoes) and an actor called Michael Jai White. Now, Michael is a 4th degree Black Belt in seven separate martial art disciplines and Mr. Kimbo is a…well…steam roller! During the interview Michael showed that one does not only rely on speed and power to dominate the opponent. Real competitors are so well trained that they anticipate the next move in a fraction of a second. What gives the better fighter an advantage is Technique. In the MMA parlance there is a concept of Pound & Ground which basically means some serious ass whopping and Kimbo is the master of Pound & Ground. Michael challenged Kimbo that he could break his defense at will. And to demonstrate his point on technique Michael showed that by simply changing one’s stance he could do some serious damage to the opponent. The key was to control “telegraphing”. For example, for a trained boxer the first signal to counter a punch is reading the shoulder movement because they are trained to do so. Michael then went on tap on Kimbo at will and the Master Brawler could not do anything because Michael simply did not use his shoulder to launch the punch.

There is a great insight in “telegraphing”. As individuals we experience telegraphing in our everyday life. It can be found from anticipating danger that a break light signifies to simply understanding the nervous twitch that your boss gives on a bad day. It is about how we internalize signals and rely on reflex to react in the shortest possible time.

In the big bad corporate world marketers across industries are trying their best to outdo their competition. And agencies are spending hours on devising complicated strategies to help them do that. Somewhere we find that the situation is similar to sparring matches between well trained gladiators. One wrong move would call the curtains.

A few years back a FMCG major was launching a variant of their most popular wafers. So they decided to test market it in a small isolated market. Surprisingly, even before they could analyze the test results, the competition did a full rollout of the improved variant. The result was simple…single punch knockout. So they went from a category innovator to poor follower in no time. This had long term impact on the mother brand and in a very short time the brand lost major market share.

So what happened? Brand A did everything as per their manual. They had a good product. They had the pricing sorted out. They had identified the market with the best potential. Yet, it would seem that they lost out to brand B on speed. It could have happened to anyone. In fact, this is a very common occurrence where a brand loses out to the competition purely on speed.

But let’s take another case. A new entrant (Brand X) in to the highly competitive consumer electronics decided not to enter market the conventional way. Instead they tied up with multiple institutions for commercial installation for their leading product. No announcement… No Advertising… Nothing whatsoever. The results were astonishing. Before the competition could realize anything, Brand X had already achieved on two critical parameters i.e brand visibility and experience. It was just a matter of time until Brand X could make significant impact at a fraction of a cost.

So what happened? Simply put, Brand X created a blind spot for the competition. The competition was not trained to pick up signals that would spell danger for them. In this case installation led approach was not a threat to the competition so it was completely ignored.

But the trick is not being subversive but being in control. The marketer needs to make his actions differentiated and memorable.

For example, imagine for a moment that you're standing on a busy road. In a span of a few minutes literally thousands of cars will speed by. Some will be loud. Others quiet. Some will be notable, but most won't. At the end of the experiment, if you were to recall ten cars and trucks and what was memorable about them, I guarantee that you would be hard pressed to do so. What's more, none of the cars would have been "repeat impressions." You saw each car only once, and likely not every vehicle on the highway. That's precisely the same challenge that marketers face.

Telegraphing is also appearing the way we look at online. We all know that consumers are spending a record amount of time on social networks. The two leaders are Facebook and Twitter. As both race to add features, they are increasingly adopting the same style of presenting information--an endless stream of brief but captivating status updates.

So far, attention-starved consumers by all indicators are eating it up. As a society we're becoming addicted to the infinite pipeline of status updates, short videos, and photos produced by our friends.

For most marketers these have become a must of their online plan. One tends to believe that having a mere presence would ensure the brands success. Unfortunately, it is not true. It only gives the competition the chance to track and replicate efforts.

The successful brand of the future would be the one that would have the tenacity and capability to try new ways to promote itself. I guess the famous words of Raymond Lindquist - the Hollywood pastor - sums it all… “Courage is the power to let go of the familiar.”

The marketer of the future shall have to reinvent the paradigms set by their predecessors. The edge would be in the technique that they would adopt. They would need to break the norms before anyone sets it. That’s going to be the key to getting the consumer!