I have been very interested in branding of the marketing field. After reading Derrick Daye’s blog post about his opinion of first-mover, I get a new way of thinking.

I used to have an idea in mind that I need to do different things in order to gain a competitive advantage. However, I ignored the fact that many successful brands were not the first one appeared in the market, such as Google, Facebook, etc. Derrick said, “Part of the reason for the success of second-movers is that technology leaders tend to focus on the technology while technology followers focus more on the business model.” It was an important call that innovation can put the company in the leader position for a short period of time, but how to maintain that position and preventing itself being leapfrogged must be taken into consideration.

He also mentioned that big companies which have great brand marketing skills can easily imitate small companies’ ideas or technologies and use their market power still become market leaders. Usually, people think “copycat” can hardly beat the first-mover company, but here is not like that. If the big companies are inspired by others’ idea and improve their product somehow, there is no reason for consumers to reject.

Invention is very costly, and it is not too bad if one lose the opportunity to be a first-mover. A fast follower with the marketplace advantage sometimes can become even more successful.