I was walking home from breakfast yesterday when I saw two burly city pigeons pecking the heck out of each other on the sidewalk in front of me. The fight was fast and brutal. I recoiled at the *fwoop, fwoop* sounds as these two (forgive me) feather-weights battered each other with their wings and stabbed at each other’s jugulars with their sharp pigeon beaks. If I were a small, pigeon-loving child I’m sure it would have made me cry.
As I watched these gray-mottled warriors lunge at each other for round 2, I wondered, what was it that could have caused such an epic pigeon prize fight? An abandoned piece of rustic artesian bread? The affections of a particularly comely female pigeon? The sad realization that these pigeons were, err, pigeons, doomed to live short and meaningless pigeon lives?
I mean, there had to be a good reason that these pigeons were suddenly going for the throat. . .didn’t there? Didn’t there?
Finally the fight broke off and both pigeons (the gray one on the left and the . . .err . . .gray one on the right) launched themselves back up into the air and settled onto the awning of the supermarket. I caught the eye of one of them as he flapped his way up and what I saw there explained everything.
*Because in the eyes of that pigeon I saw nothing but simple, frustrated confusion.*
That pigeon had *no idea* why it had just been in a fight. It had *no idea* what it had just put its life on the line for. And it had *no idea* what it was going to do to make sure it never got into a situation like that again.
*Which is sort of like what a lot of businesses do with their marketing.*
They go hard charging into a market and peck at their competitors throats, fighting to the death over a few scraps of business. Money’s spent. Blood is drawn and when all is said and done, all you’ve got is two beat up and confused pigeons struggling to stay in business.
*Which to my way of thinking, is kind of dumb.*
In another article I wrote that “Competition is an old myth made up by old men with old ideas and no imagination. There’s work out there-big gobs of it-plenty to make all of us fat and happy and (if we eat too much) probably a little tired.”
Which I really feel like extends out to business in general. I mean, sure, Coke and Pepsi go to war on the airwaves every night, spending huge gobs of money in a desperate fight for market share.
But smart business folks, agile business folks and successful business folks who don’t have million dollar ad budgets know that if you want to *win* a pigeon fight, you’ve got to find a way to avoid getting into that pigeon fight in the first place.
How?
By doing the not-so-hard work of positioning your business, finding a broad niche to explore and realizing that the next guy down the power line isn’t a *threat* to your business, he’s a potential partner who can help you get your fill of all the day old bread you can eat.
(And if that’s not a weirdly stretched metaphor, I don’t know what is.)