sold out in all 250 stores over the weekend, spending less than a quarter of what the ad would have cost.


By finding a sliver of time left on the clock – that slice between the customer walking in the store and their actually buying a product – Adobe snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.


Ask yourself: how can you shift time and turn a sprint into a marathon – or a marathon into a sprint?


These are three of the 33 brand stories in Killing Giants: 10 Strategies to Topple the Goliath In Your Industry – and it only takes 1 to dramatically shift your perspective and change your brand’s trajectory. Go pick up a copy wherever you buy books.


Your CEO will thank you. Stephen Denny is the


author of the new book, “KILLING GIANTS: 10 Startegies to Topple Goliath in Your Industry” (Portfolio Penguin, April 2011)


runner into a more natural, barefoot style of running. The results are less knee pain, better posture and an instant conversation starter wherever you go.


Vibram – being a component supplier to other finished goods brands – first presented the concept to its key customers. All shied away. None could see themselves taking the risk on this outlandish design. Their risk intolerance became Vibram’s entre into the competitive shoe market, launching a product that only they could credibly launch: a product that looks like a shoe sole painted on the bottom of the wearer’s foot.


Ask yourself: how can you “do the unthinkable” and do what your competitors find impossible, given their established structures?


Adobe and winning in the last three feet.


Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving, marking the beginning of the holiday shopping season for most US retailers and a crucial bell-weather for most consumer brands. If you don’t do well on Black Friday, you don’t do well this year. So when Adobe’s promised Black Friday circular ad was pulled by its largest retailer and given to its largest competitor, the brand was in a bind.


Not content to bemoan its fate and wait for the next major merchandising event, Adobe played the hand they’d been dealt deftly, sending retail demonstrators into the top 250 stores in the chain for the Black Friday weekend, intercepting customers clutching their competitor’s ad and showing off the benefits of buying their brand, instead. They


19 marketingtimes


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