I had the opportunity to go to the movies this past weekend at my local movie theater. In the past, I would go out of my way to avoid this theater (35 minutes away) because it wasn’t updated and there are larger stadium style seating theaters with state of the art sound that are further away and perceivably more modern.

I’d heard that my local theater had made some changes, but nothing dramatic as far as I knew. Boy, was I pleasantly surprised! The place was the same on the outside which is behind a shopping mall and kinda off the beaten path. However, to my delight inside it was completely new and somewhat renovated. This experience sparked me into thinking of how small brands can use marketing competitive intelligence to not only compete with larger brands with far larger budgets, but also present themselves as a thought leader and a formidable foe.

4 Ways Smaller Brands Can Use Competitive Intelligence To Compete With Larger Brands

1. Know who you are and stick with that

It will be difficult to differentiate yourself as a smaller brand if you don’t know your unique strengths. This theater faced the fact that they were still (at their very core) a movie theater and a small one at that. They carry the same movies that the larger brands carry (not nearly as many theaters) and staying just a “movie theater” (although not the only option) was the right choice. They could have gotten in the arcade business or maybe allowed some other vendors in to sell other items, but they remained true to their purpose. We’ve all seen so many companies want to crush the competition so badly that they lose their identity by adding on services or products that made sense on the surface but went against who they really were; only to fail. There are costly examples of not knowing, moving away from, or (even worse) being over confident in who you are and thinking that your strong “brand identity” can compensate for areas that are foreign to your core capabilities, mission and/or original purpose.

One of the first ways that I realized my local theatre demonstrated command of this was by taking advantage of the now under utilized ticket booth in front of the theater. Most of us purchase our movie tickets at the self service kiosk or online. So what to do with the DJ Booth? Well put a DJ in it! That’s exactly what they did.

My theater, (notice that I’m not disowning them anymore :)) found the most friendly articulate service minded person in all of Charles County Maryland to work in this booth behind 6 feet of glass with a wireless headset & a broadcast, quality voice. This”theater concierge” has a simple PC monitor on a swivel that he spins around and uses its highlighting features to share with ticket purchasers all of the available seating options and the advantage of particular seating within the theater. Oh did I mention that this theatre has replaced all of its seating with red leather recliners? Yes all seats in this theater are now assigned. They’ve installed three or four levels of risers from the back to the front and conveniently segmented each theater with row numbers and lettered seating which is written on the floor. This leads to my second way for “little shot” to compete with the “big shot.”

2. Change your Strategy Not Your Identity

In order to facilitate side by side recliners my already “small” theater became even smaller in size. However, the theater now sells out nearly every show. In addition, to cut costs the theater increased it’s food menu, but decreased the amount if workers by using self-serve beverage machines that offer far more drink options. They literally had 10 flavors of lemonade in the soft drink machine. It takes a higher level of awareness to understand the value that you offer or to find the unique among the simple. If you can focus on how that value affects various personas your messaging expands overall. You don’t have to be every thing to everyone in order to be true to yourself.

Yes every theater provides soft drinks but my theatre provides free refills on any size and let’s you serve yourself. For them, it’s a small differentiator that along with the other wholesale changes makes a big difference and this is a great example of how less, can be more.

They even changed the cup sizes so that they don’t really lose on free refills. The Mayor of New York would lose his lunch if he saw that a small drink was 36 oz, but for them it means less people taking advantage of the free refill.

3. Focus on what people care about and not just what you “think” that they are talking about.

One of the things that has garnered my attention about this category of marketing competitive intelligence tracking & benchmarking is that it’s NOT monitoring. I continuously correct myself because there is a huge difference between monitoring and tracking. Monitoring is more about listening for similarities and or common threads. Tracking is about identifying the forces that cause someone to head in a particular direction based on what they “care about”. I can tell that you care about something if you comment, like or share it. If I have a way of continuously “tracking” this I can tailor my messaging to the things that you care about, which is exactly what my local theater did for me. They didn’t care that people were talking about how old and outdated they were. They chose to focus on what movie goers cared about and that was the movie experience.

I often coach my sales organization with these words… “Prospects don’t buy our services, products, or ideas. What they buy is how they imagine using the product will make them feel.”

I care about my movie experience. I work on average 70 hours per week. Not because I have to but because I love what I do. However, when the weekend comes I want my movie experience or sports event experience to capture my attention as well; if not better than my work/professional experience. My movie theatre captures this for me and I’d like to think that it was intentional. They began with the end in mind. They focused on what they knew that I really cared about.

4. The Journey is the Destination

My local theater couldn’t make this transformation overnight. At first it was just a few of their 6 or 8 viewing theaters and by the time I came the process was complete.

True marketing competitive intelligence allows you to see yourself across all channels. Today you can focus on besting your competition in content marketing tomorrow or next year you can take your awareness, performance, and focus on leading in YouTube. All the while doing this you can see what the most impactful and/or engaging content is on these channels and go big when the time is right!

I would be curious to know some things about your journey and how you are identifying your value and using it to Go Big Or Go Home. Feel free to leave a comment below or tweet me what you think at (@RPMSalesCoach).