Out-Teach Your Competition

Definition

Advertising, sales, and event sponsorship are moves every competitor can copy, so they don't differentiate. The book proposes a channel competitors rarely even consider: "Instead of trying to outspend, outsell, or outsponsor competitors, try to out-teach them... Most businesses focus on selling or servicing, but teaching never even occurs to them." Teaching forms a different kind of bond than paid attention: "Buying people's attention with a magazine or online banner ad is one thing. Earning their loyalty by teaching them forms a whole different connection."

In the Book

The chapter's examples are all small operators teaching in their own domain of expertise: the Hoefler Type Foundry teaching designers about typography at Typography.com, Etsy running workshops on best practices and promotion for its sellers, and wine-shop owner Gary Vaynerchuk teaching people about wine daily on Wine Library TV to an audience of tens of thousands. The book argues this asymmetry is structural, not just a matter of willingness: big companies can afford a Super Bowl ad, but "big companies are obsessed with secrecy. Everything at those places has to get filtered through a lawyer and go through layers of red tape" — so teaching openly is a move a small company can make that a large competitor organizationally cannot.

Why It Matters

This identifies a form of marketing whose advantage compounds with trust rather than decaying with ad fatigue, and whose access is gated less by budget than by organizational willingness to be transparent. It matters most for smaller players precisely because it's a channel where incumbents' size and caution work against them instead of for them.