So Yahoo! has teamed up with Google in a two-week advertising experiment with the clear intention of frustrating Microsoft in its hostile takeover bid. It’s a cunning move and akin to calling in your older cousin as back-up for playground fistycuffs.
Microsoft’s responding by rallying support in the shape of News Corp, while Yahoo!’s also threatening to bring in an uncle in the shape of AOL, who while a little rusty used to be able to pack a punch and whose dad is well hard.
The concept of using your mates to get ahead in business is an interesting one and ‘collaboration’ seems a bit of a buzzword at the moment.
It’s not without legs. ‘Competition’ remains a fundamental part of any risk assessment analysis and so banks, investors and entrepreneurs from a more financial background will always be intrinsically mindful of what ‘competitors’ are up to.
Others' motivation for winning in business is beating others, hence the fascination in drawing comparisons between entrepreneurs and sportspeople.
It’s an instinctive attitude. Arguably Britain’s greatest economist, Herbert Spencer, is often credited with first using the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ whereas he actually applied it to free markets having read Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
Less steeped in history, ‘keep your friends close and your enemies even closer’ is another heavily used phrase in the final process of a SWOT analysis.
It’s all perfectly healthy. Business is all about differentiation. As Emma writes in her blog, 'Anything you can do, I can do better', there are very few unique ideas around and most entrepreneurs find success by simply improving an existing one via a superior product, better customer service, business model, price structure or branding.
Yet there is a point where being aware of the competition crosses to paranoia. Where you become more focussed on not conceding ground to anyone vaguely operating in your area that you lose sight of opportunities that could actually be collaborative not competitive.
Some trades have realised this for years. Restaurants and estate agents traditionally group together despite chasing the same pound, while florists have enjoyed strong synergies with those servicing weddings and funerals.
When I interviewed CD WOW! founder Phil Robinson in 2006 he attributed much of the company’s spectacular growth with striking collaborative partnerships with credit card and mobile companies. At that point he’d never paid for advertising yet had a £100m business generating interest from some 80,000,000 communications a year slipped into partners' mail-outs.
Facebook’s embracing of the apps culture has seen it not just build membership and revenues but also enable what could have been potential competitors for web traffic prosper within its framework.
Innocent Drinks is another prime example of a company which, at least from a PR perspective, handles the issue of collaboration intelligently. It's as competitive as the next drinks company and displays its market share prominently on its website, but co-founder Richard Reed frequently welcomes and supports competitive entries into the healthy drinks market as a positive swelling of that customer base.
Compare that to PepsiCo, which this week had a complaint about the validity of Innocent’s ads thrown out by the Advertising Standards Authority. For PR and crude profit, wouldn’t Pepsi Co be better served either concentrating on selling cola or coming up with a good smoothie offering rather than rubbishing competitors?
As Yahoo! and Microsoft are finding out, it’s great to have friends, not just enemies, in business.
