Reverse benchmarking reveals that the strongest competitive advantage may lie not in copying what rivals do well, but in owning the customer need they all neglect.
By Manuel Veiruapi Ruhapo | The Brand Paradox | The Botswana Gazette
Every marketing agency in the world will tell you to benchmark the best. Find out who is winning, study what they are doing and apply it to your own business. The logic is clean: identify best practice, replicate it and improve on it.
REVERSE BENCHMARKING
Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK and one of marketing’s most counterintuitive thinkers, says this is exactly backwards.
Sutherland calls his alternative approach reverse benchmarking. Instead of asking, “What are the best players in this category doing well?” you ask, “What are all the players in this category doing badly?” Then you take that gap, own it completely and build your brand around it.
The result, when done correctly, is not a brand that is slightly better than its competitors. It is a brand that is incomparable to them.
THE RESTAURANT
Sutherland tells the story of a research team visiting top-tier restaurants on behalf of a client. The food was excellent. The service was refined. The wine lists were curated, and the staff were knowledgeable.
But when two members of the research party asked for beer instead of wine, something changed. The beer drinkers were handed a short list with minimal explanation and treated, as Sutherland put it, like second-class citizens. The sommelier’s expertise and careful recommendations evaporated the moment someone chose not to drink wine.
The research team’s recommendation was not to improve the already excellent food or wine service. It was to treat beer drinkers with the same care, knowledge and ceremony that the best restaurants reserved for wine. Introduce a considered beer menu. Train staff to pair craft beers with dishes. Make the beer drinker feel as valued as the wine drinker.
The restaurant did exactly that. It went from number 50 in the world to number 1.
The food did not change. The gap that nobody else had filled did.
THE PARADOX
Here is the counterargument that holds equally true.
Reverse benchmarking only works when the gap you identify is real and the customers who live in that gap are actually worth serving. An extraordinary beer programme succeeds because fine-dining beer drinkers are numerous, underserved and willing to pay for the experience. The gap was real. The audience was real.
A brand that identifies a gap that does not correspond to a genuine unmet need is not reverse benchmarking. It is differentiation for its own sake. The test is not, “Can we do this differently?” The test is, “Is there a customer who is currently being failed by everyone in this category, and are we willing to serve them better than anyone else?”
If the answer to both questions is yes, the gap is yours to own. If the answer to either question is no, you are building a feature, not a brand.
BOTSWANA BRANDS
The banking sector in Botswana benchmarks against itself. Every bank competes on interest rates, branch locations, digital platforms and product bundles. Research teams visit the same competitors, identify the same best practices and produce the same recommendations. The result is a category where every brand looks and sounds like every other brand.
The gap that every bank in Botswana is failing to fill is not a product gap. It is a language gap. No bank communicates in the financial reality of most customers: extended family obligations, informal income, cattle as savings, the financial weight of funerals, and the complexity of supporting parents and siblings on a single salary. Every bank speaks to an idealised customer with a stable income, a single household and a straightforward financial life. That customer is not the majority.
The bank that looks at what every other bank does badly and builds its communication strategy around the customer everyone else ignores does not need a better interest rate to win. It needs a better question.
The same gap exists in the funeral industry, where every provider competes on price and package contents while the customer’s actual need is dignity, relief and the cultural weight of how Batswana honour the dead. It exists in the restaurant sector, where every establishment competes on cuisine and price while the experience of the customer who does not drink alcohol, who brings children or who arrives after 8pm is an afterthought.
The gap is sitting in plain sight in every category in this market. The question is whether any brand is willing to look at what its competitors do badly and decide that is where it will be extraordinary.
WHAT IT MEANS
If you are a business owner or executive: Next time you commission competitive research, change the brief. Do not ask what your competitors do well. Ask what they all do badly, consistently and without exception. That list is your strategic opportunity.
If you are a marketing professional: Reverse benchmarking begins with observation, not data. Spend time as a customer in your category. Notice where the experience fails, staff disengage or the service falls short of the promise. Those moments are the brief.
If you are a brand manager: The restaurant did not become number one by improving what was already excellent. It became number one by filling a gap that everyone else had decided was not worth filling. That decision is available to you in almost every category in Botswana.
Your competitors have already told you where to win. They told you every time they failed a customer and did not notice.
ABOUT THE COLUMN
The Brand Paradox is a weekly column by Manuel Veiruapi Ruhapo that explores the counterintuitive truths behind building great brands in Botswana and beyond. Manuel Ruhapo is the founder of Blacmarc Group, a brand strategy consultancy that helps businesses solve their most complex brand challenges.
Contact: manuel.ruhapo@blacmarc.co.bw / ruhapo@gmail.com