Unfair Advantage Audit
Find freedoms incumbents lack, then build the strategy around them
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 99%
The Unfair Advantage Audit starts by examining the unusual freedoms and assets created by an organization’s position rather than copying category leaders. A new entrant may have no legacy expectations, fixed venues, restrictive rights agreements, or entrenched revenue model. Even low revenue can be useful because little existing income is endangered by experimentation. The team lists these asymmetries, asks what incumbents cannot or will not do, and converts the answers into strategic choices. The resulting strategy should lean heavily on advantages that established players would find economically, culturally, or operationally difficult to reproduce.
Origin
Extracted from Marketing Against The Grain, where Kip Bodner applies his recurring unfair-advantages question to Major League Pickleball.
Core principles
- 01Every situation contains constraints and asymmetric freedoms
- 02A lack of legacy can be an advantage
- 03Weak current economics can permit business-model experimentation
- 04The strongest strategy exploits what established competitors cannot copy easily
How to run it
- 1
Inventory the situation
List the organization’s scale, assets, obligations, conventions, revenue sources, and audience expectations.
Pro tip Include apparent weaknesses because they may create freedom.
Watch out Do not benchmark only against the category leader’s visible strengths.
- 2
Identify incumbent baggage
Document the traditions, contracts, infrastructure, and economics that constrain established competitors.
Pro tip Ask what competitors would upset or cannibalize by changing.
Watch out An incumbent disadvantage is useful only if it creates an actionable opening.
- 3
Find asymmetric freedoms
Identify what the organization can do cheaply or safely that incumbents cannot.
Pro tip Look at content rights, pricing, distribution, formats, and business models.
Watch out Avoid calling a generic capability an unfair advantage.
- 4
Design around the advantage
Build tactics and investments that amplify the strongest freedoms until they become difficult to copy.
Pro tip Prefer advantages that improve with use or scale.
Watch out Do not bury the advantage inside a conventional category strategy.
In the wild
A young sports league recognizes that it lacks incumbent broadcast revenue but also lacks restrictive media obligations. It opens selected feeds for remixing, designs venues for digital production, and grows through distributed creator coverage.
→ The apparent revenue weakness becomes an audience-distribution advantage.
Common mistakes
Copying the incumbent playbook
Imitating mature competitors discards the entrant’s freedom while preserving its scale disadvantage.
Ignoring useful weaknesses
Low revenue, limited history, or small scale may permit experiments that would threaten an incumbent’s existing business.
Is it for you?
Best for
It is best for challengers, startups, new leagues, and brands entering markets dominated by legacy operators.
Not ideal for
It is not ideal when the organization has no meaningful differentiation and cannot change its operating model.
From the transcript
“I will always come in. Kieran will roll his eyes. I'll be like, let's talk about what the unfair advantages of this situation are.”
“One, it has no baggage. It doesn't have an old traditional way of doing things like tennis, golf, other similar sports have, right?”
“Another unfair advantage pickleball has is it has really low revenues. So it can actually be really differentiated in how it makes money”
From the episode
CMO for the Day: Marketing Pickleball