• by Tom Hespos , June 11, 2002

I'll never forget the first time that Ed beat me at tennis.

One summer, my best friend Ed decided he would take up the game, and he asked me if I would teach him to play. A few times a week, Ed and I would ride our bikes up to Bayberry Park and would snag one of the public courts for a few hours. I taught him groundstrokes, lobs, how to rush the net and how to serve. Sometimes we would take a few of our friends up to Bayberry and play doubles. Ed learned a lot that summer, and by late July, he got to the point where we could have a competitive 3-set match. One day, as the sun was going down and we were heading home, Ed asked "Do you think I'll ever beat you?"

"Nah," I said. "I'm on the high school team. Plus, my dad and I have some court time once a week at night. I play a lot more than you do."

Talk about getting set up for a fall…

In late August, Ed and I went to Bayberry Park to play a match. During the first set, I hit a nice serve and it came off Ed's racquet kind of funny. Carrying a lot of backspin, the ball just barely cleared the net, bounced once and didn't even carry into the backcourt. In tennis, one might call that a "drop shot," but people who played on the high school team called it a "cheap dink shot." I couldn't get to it in time, so the point went to Ed.

A couple serves later, Ed hit another dink shot – this time on purpose. I ran to the net and managed to reach it before its second bounce, but I returned it weakly and Ed slammed it back down the line, winning another point.

Ed soon realized that he couldn't compete with me by trying to force errors with his groundstrokes. The dink shot became another stroke in his arsenal. If I strayed too far back behind the baseline, Ed would hit his dink shot. I would either fail to get there before the ball's second bounce, or I would hit a poor shot that Ed could easily return to win the point.

Ed continued to hit these shots, the entire rhythm of the game changed, and I was getting more and more frustrated. A guy who didn't play on the team and who had picked up a racquet for the first time that summer was kicking my butt, and I wasn't happy about it. Instead of relying on my solid groundstrokes, I would try to "out-dink" Ed and I failed miserably at it. That match ended with Ed winning a tiebreaker.

Ed was ecstatic. I was feeling dejected. I don't think I said more than three words to him as we rode our bikes home that afternoon.

That night, I thought long and hard about how Ed was able to beat me. Essentially, it came down to this: He forced me to play HIS game. Had I stuck to the strong parts of my game, I would probably have beaten him. Instead, I ran up and down the court until I was too tired to play the type of game I was comfortable playing.

I was reminded of that tennis match this past week when I met with a potential client. Up against financial behemoths in their category, this potential client brought Underscore Marketing in to talk about using the types of tactics that many agencies haven't yet figured out how to make profitable: Guerilla marketing, local events, low-cost sales support – the types of things a former boss of mine used to describe as "below the line stuff."

Due to its low cost of implementation, we discussed employing the Internet, CD-ROMs and a low-volume CRM program in the marketing mix. Not exactly the stuff that gets agencies with big TV budgets terribly excited.

As the meeting progressed and we talked about these ideas, it occurred to me that this small company could easily succeed using low-cost tactics that connected with the consumer on a local level. Why? Because these tactics were the types of things that larger companies employing big agencies would never think to employ. A nationwide financial services company would never be able to get a large agency conglomerate to even look at these tactics. And that's precisely the reason why they would work.

Essentially, this small company was going to change the game, much like Ed did in that tennis match many summers ago. By connecting with consumers at the local level through unconventional means, they will take advantage of relationship-building techniques that a larger company would have tremendous difficulty replicating via a mass marketing approach.

Toward the end of the meeting, the client confirmed my suspicions that it would be tough for a larger company to compete with them. He told me that a national conglomerate that his company works with had tried to connect with the target we were discussing at the meeting, but had failed because their mass marketing approach hadn't taken into consideration the subtle traits that made this target unique. The large conglomerate was now turning to smaller partners to help them, perhaps with co-op dollars, to meet the marketing challenge by using the very same tactics we were discussing.

This was a real eye-opener for me. It reinforced a marketing principle that seems to come up again and again in my dealings with clients both large and small: When the game is stacked against you, your best bet is to play another game.

Ed was tired of losing to me in our summer tennis matches, so he shifted control of the match by forcing me to play his type of game. Our new client will probably succeed because they're changing how their marketing game is played.