I f you need to buy a book online, which website do you visit first? If you want to research the author of the book, which search engine do you use? The answers, most probably, are Amazon and Google, respectively. Such is the dominance of these two Internet giants that their names define their respective markets.
Both organizations have a significant edge in the markets they lead, but they achieved that dominance by different means. Amazon, launched in 1995, gained its advantage by being the first business to enter the online retail market, establishing its brand name, and building a loyal customer base. Google, by contrast, was by no means first. When Google launched in 1998, the market was already dominated by several large players; Google’s edge came from offering a superior product not only was it faster, but it produced more accurate search results than any of its competitors.
Getting into a market first has significant advantages, but there are also benefits to being second. The key is that in order to gain a competitive edge in the market, a business needs either to be first, or it needs to be better.
Market pioneers
The benefits of being first into a market are known as “first mover advantage,” a term popularized in 1988 by Stanford Business School professor David Montgomery and his co author, Marvin Lieberman. Although introduced a decade previously, Montgomery and Lieberman’s idea took particular hold during the dot com bubble between 1997 and 2000. Spurred on by the example of Amazon, businesses spent millions pitching themselves headlong into new online markets. Conventional wisdom was that being first ensured that the company’s brand name became synonymous with that segment, and that early market dominance would create barriers to entry for subsequent competition.
In the end, however, overspending, overhype, and overreaching into markets where little demand existed was the downfall of many fledgling dot-coms. With notable exceptions, businesses found that promised returns were not being realized and funds quickly ran short and for many of these first movers, failure followed.
Amazon.com was a first-mover
in the online retail market. It has
dominated the industry since its
launch in 1995, creating strong brand
recognition and a loyal customer base.
First mover advantage
Being first out of the block
undoubtedly has its advantages,
and in the case of the dot-coms,
those advantages were exaggerated
to the extreme. First-movers often
enjoy premium prices, capture
significant market share, and have a brand name strongly linked to
the market itself. First-movers also
have more time than later entrants
to perfect processes and systems,
and to accumulate market
knowledge. They can also secure
advantageous physical locations
(a prime location on a main street
of a city, for example), secure the
employment of talented staff, or
access beneficial terms with key
suppliers (who may also be eager to
enter the new market). Additionally,
first-movers may be able to build
switching costs into their product,
making it expensive or inconvenient
for customers to switch to a rival
offering once an initial purchase
has been made. Gillette, for example,
having invented the safety razor in
1901, has consistently leveraged its
first-mover advantage to create new
products, such as a “shaving system”
that combines cheap handles with
expensive razor blades.
Market strategies
In the case of Amazon.com, firstmover advantage consisted of a
combination of factors. In the newly
emerging e-commerce market,
customers were eager to try online
purchasing, and Amazon was well
placed to exploit this growing
curiosity. Books represented a small
and safe initial purchase, and
Amazon’s simple web design made
buying easy and enjoyable. Early
sales enabled the organization to
adapt and perfect its systems,
and to adjust its website to match
customer needs adding, for
example, its OneClick ordering
system to enable purchases
without entering payment details.
Amazon was also able to build
distribution systems that ensured
quick and reliable delivery of its
products. Although competitors
could replicate these systems,
customers already trusted
Amazon, and the brand loyalty the organization enjoyed created
significant emotional switching
costs; even today, Amazon enjoys
the benefits of this trust and loyalty,
and almost a third of all US book
sales are made via Amazon.com.
A recent example of how
important first-mover advantage
remains are the “patent wars”
contested between most of the
leading smartphone makers
(including Apple, Samsung, and
HTC). Patents help a company to
defend technological advantage. In
the hypercompetitive smartphone
industry, being first to market with
a new technological feature offers
critical, albeit short-term, advantage.
In an industry in which consumers’
switching costs are high, even
short-term advantages can have
a significant impact on revenue.
Since the publication of
Montgomery and Lieberman’s
original paper in 1988, academic research has indicated that
significant advantages accrue
to market pioneers, which can be
directly attributable to the timing
of entry. The irony is that in a
retrospective paper that appeared
in 1998, “First-Mover (Dis)
Advantages,” Montgomery and
Lieberman themselves backed off
their original claims concerning
the benefits of being the first to
enter a market.
Building on the work of, among
others, US academics Peter Golder
and Gerard Tellis in 1993,
Montgomery and Lieberman’s 1998
paper questioned the entire notion
of first-mover advantage. In their
research, Golder and Tellis had
found that almost half the firstmovers in their sample of 500
brands, in 50 product categories,
failed. Moreover, they found that
there were few cases where later
entrants had not become profitable
or even dominant players in fact,
their research identified that the
failure rate for first-movers was
47 percent, compared to only
8 percent for fast followers.
Gillette invented the safety razor
in 1901 and later consolidated its
first-mover advantage by developing a
“shaving system” that made it difficult
for customers to switch brands.
Learning from mistakes
The challenge for first-movers is
that the market is often unproven;
industry pioneers leap into the
dark without fully understanding
customer needs or market
dynamics. First-movers often
launch untried products onto
unsuspecting customers; and it is
rare that they get it right first time.
Large companies may be able to
take the losses of such early-market
entry mistakes; small companies,
on the other hand, may soon find
that their cash is running out and
their tenuous business models
are collapsing.
Later entrants have the
advantage of learning from the
mistakes of the first-movers, and from entering a proven market.
They are also able to avoid costly
investment in risky and potentially
flawed processes or technologies;
first-movers, by contrast, may have
accrued significant “sunk costs”
(past investment) in old, lessefficient technologies, and may be
less able to adapt as the industry
matures. Followers can enter at
the point at which technology
and processes are relatively well
established, with both cost and
risks being lower.
Followers may have to fight
to overcome the first-movers’
brand loyalty, but simply offering
a superior product that better
addresses customer needs is
often sufficient to secure a market.
Brand recognition is one thing,
but technical and product superiority
can give that all-important
competitive edge. Moreover, with
investment costs being much
lower, followers often have surplus
cash to use on marketing, thereby
offsetting the branding advantages
of the first mover.
When Google, for example,
entered the Internet search
business in 1998, the market was
dominated by the likes of Yahoo,
Lycos, and AltaVista, all of whom
had established customer bases
and brand recognition. However,
Google was able to learn from the mistakes of these earlier entrants
and, quite simply, build a better
product. The organization realized
that with so much information on
the Internet people wanted search
results that were comprehensive
and relevant; the various market
incumbents offered a variety of
systems for filtering search results,
but Google was able to take the
best of these systems and build
its own unique algorithm that led
to market dominance.
First mover failures
There are numerous examples in
corporate history of first-movers
that were unable to achieve or
maintain a competitive advantage.
Famous failures in the online
sphere include Friends Reunited
and MySpace. Although both
companies still exist, their firstmover advantage was not sufficient
to offset the might (and product
superiority) of Facebook. Similarly,
eToys.com, launched in 1999, was
one of a new breed of online retailers,
but first-mover advantage was not
enough to sustain the business and
the company declared bankruptcy
in 2001 by coincidence, the same
year that Amazon started to sell
toys. (Resurrected some years later,
etoys.com is now owned by Toys R Us.) The online clothing retailer
boo.com is an example of a firstmover that had technological
superiority, but was ahead of its
time—the site was too resourceheavy for most consumers’ slow
Internet connections. Launched in
1999, boo.com went into receivership
the following year being first is
not a guarantee of success if the
basic business model is flawed.
Despite the evidence presented
by Golder and Tellis, and examples
such as Google, it remains the case
that first-mover advantage has
captured corporate imagination.
Mirroring the earlier dot-com gold
rush, the recent boom in the market
for web-based smartphone- and
tablet-accessed applications (the
“app” market) is fueled by a desire
to be first. Thousands of apps have
launched in the hope of staking
their claims on lucrative segments of this new market. But success
is not guaranteed a 2012 study
revealed that on average, 65
percent of users delete apps within
90 days of installing them.
Timing is everything
The reason a first-mover does
not always yield its promised
advantages is that much depends
on timing, and therefore luck. In
their 2005 paper, “The Half-Truth
of First-Mover Advantage,” US
business scholars Fernando Suarez
and Gianvito Lanzolla identified
technological innovation and the
speed at which the market is
developing as crucial in
determining whether or not being
a first-mover is advantageous.
Their findings suggest that
when a market is slow-moving and
technological evolution is limited,
first-mover advantage can be significant. They give the example
of the market for vacuum cleaners,
and, in particular, of the long term
market leader, Hoover. Until the
relatively recent introduction of
Dyson cleaners, the market was
benign and technological
advancement slow. Having been
first to market in 1908, Hoover
enjoyed several decades of
advantage an advantage that
was (and, in some places, still is)
reflected in the widespread use of
the company’s brand name as the
verb “to hoover.”
In other industries, however,
where technological change or
market evolution is rapid, firstmovers are often at a disadvantage.
The first search engines are
examples of businesses that had
too much invested in early
iterations of a technology to keep
up with the rapid pace of change Early advantage quickly
becomes obsolete in changeable
markets. As the market evolves,
later entrants are those that seem
to be cutting edge, offering
innovative features that build on
the market-knowledge as well as
learning from the mistakes of the
first-mover. The first mover may have enjoyed short-lived advantage
but in dynamic markets such an
advantage is rarely durable. Even
Apple, who enjoyed significant
early entrant advantage in the
smartphone market with the
iPhone, is not immune from firstmover disadvantage. Competitors,
Samsung in particular, were able
to listen to customer complaints
about iPhones, analyze customer
needs, and produce products with
features and functionality welcomed
by the market. Apple, locked into
previous technology iterations, took
time to react and iPhone sales
suffered as a result.
Customer needs
To gain an edge, therefore, you do
not always need to be first. Indeed,
US multinational Procter & Gamble,
for example, prefers only to enter
those markets in which it can
establish a strong number one or
number two position over the longterm rarely is this achieved in a
blind rush to be first.
Procter & Gamble seeks
markets that are demographically
and structurally attractive, with
lower capital requirements, and
higher margins. But most importantly, the organization
insists on a deep understanding of
customer needs in any market they
enter. In other words, they would
rather enter mature markets than
be first into new ones.
The company values long-term
relationships with its customers
and suppliers; its view of innovation
is different from small companies
who, in attempting to capture
market share, strive to gain an
edge through the introduction of
disruptive technology innovative
technology that seeks to destabilize
the existing market. Procter &
Gamble, perhaps heeding the
research, considers such strategies
to be short-lived. They realize that
overly rapid innovation runs the risk
of cannibalizing their own sales
and reducing the returns on new
product investment. In the market
for disposable baby diapers, for
example, Procter & Gamble was
more than ten years behind the first
mover. The company’s now famous
Pampers brand was launched in
1961, following some way behind
Johnson & Johnson’s Chux brand which was launched in 1949. At
the time, disposable diapers were
a new innovation, and customers
were wary of their use. Procter &
Gamble waited until customers had
come to accept the product before
entering the market. Moreover, they
spent nearly five years researching
and addressing each of the major
problems with Chux and developed
a product that was more absorbent,
had lower leakage, was more
comfortable for the baby, offered
two sizes, and could be produced
at a significantly lower cost. Today,
Forbes magazine lists Pampers as
one of the world’s most powerful
brands, valued at over $8.5 billion,
with the diapers being purchased
by 25 million consumers in over 100
countries. By contrast, Chux was
phased out by Johnson & Johnson
in the 1970s due to shrinking sales.
Securing a foothold
In reality, then, while it is readily
assumed that speed is good when
entering a market, gaining an edge
might depend less on timing than it
does on appropriateness. Whether a
company is first, second, or last to
market is important; but it is less
important than the suitability of a company’s products or services to
that market, and its ability to
deliver on brand promises. Both
these factors can have a profound
impact on long term viability and
business success.
Amazon may have enjoyed
lasting first-mover advantage, but
that alone is insufficient to account
for its phenomenal success. Amazon
leverages its first-mover advantage
into a sustainable competitive edge;
its website is continually made
easier to use, it offers a range of
complimentary products, and it
continues to drive down costs,
enabling it to offer market-beating
prices. Most notably, Amazon did
not return a profit until 2001 the
company spent its earlier years
building a better product. The
foundations of success may have
been laid by first-mover advantage,
but Amazon’s edge has been built on
long term good business practice.
First movers undoubtedly have a
natural competitive edge. Whether
it is a lasting impression on
customers, strong brand recognition,
high switching costs, control of
scarce resources, or the advantages
of experience, that edge can help
to secure a strong, and long-term, foothold in the market. But as
research shows, second-movers,
and their followers, may sometimes
be in an advantageous position.
Learning from the mistakes of early
entrants, they frequently offer
superior products at lower prices.
With the aid of skillful marketing,
these benefits can be leveraged to
offset the advantages enjoyed by
first-movers. To become a market
leader, a business needs either to
be first, and impressive, or it needs
to be better. The companies we
remember, the Amazons and the
Googles, are those that were either
first or better the ones we forget
are those that had no edge at all.
Born on January 12, 1964 in
Albuquerque, New Mexico, US,
Jeff Bezos had an early love of
science and computers. He
studied computer science and
electrical engineering at Princeton
University, and graduated summa
cum laude in 1986.
Bezos started his career on
Wall Street, and by 1990 had
become the youngest senior
vice-president at the investment
company D. E. Shaw. Four years
later, in 1994, he quit his lucrative
job to open Amazon.com, the
online book retailer he was
barely 30 years old at the time.
As with many Internet startups, Bezos, with just a handful
of employees, created the new
business in his garage; but as
operations grew, they moved
into a small house. The Amazon.
com site was launched officially
on July 16, 1995. Amazon
became a public limited
company in 1997; the company’s
first year of profit was 2001.
Today, Bezos is listed by Forbes
magazine as one of the wealthiest
people in the US; and Amazon
stands as one of the biggest
global success stories in the
history of the Internet.
