Seizing the Lead

“Because you can win quickly by taking the lead, it is one of the most important things in strategy,” said Musashi in his strategy classic The Book of Five Rings. Extending the concept to the modern era of competitive business, this is a timeless truth in marketing.

In the fall of 2011, Amazon and Kindle had an epic race to be first—the first to undercut Apple’s iPad in the low-cost tablet market. Amazon was launching the Kindle Fire, and Barnes & Noble launched the Nook.

These companies did something that almost every other tablet manufacturer failed to do: They successfully competed with the iPad. But the keys to their success were things they had that other companies didn’t. They had loyal customer bases, and they had existing products—the Kindle and Nook e-readers—that could be reformulated into content-agnostic tablets.