9. Do Something Better Than Anyone Else: The Spearhead

“The restaurant that opened next to my office makes the best burgers in the world. If you go, ask for the house special; it’s spectacular.” How often have we heard a recommendation like this one? Putting aside the power of word of mouth, which we will be analyzing a little later, this phrase is an everyday and recognizable example of what we call “the spearhead.”

Let us look at another example that we have all experienced at one time or another. We are invited to a party and when we arrive we realize we do not know hardly anyone. After greeting the four people we have met before, we are left in that uncomfortable position in which we have nothing to do while everyone else is chatting and having a good time. Having already tried to look busy choosing appetizers, and after having had our second glass of wine, we realize that sooner or later we will have to find someone with whom to try to establish a conversation, one of those conversations that is difficult to begin and even harder to keep going after the initial introductions and typical polite questions. As our options run thin, we begin to scout the crowded room looking for that one person who, without knowing why, we think might help us take that first step. We never know what it will be that will call our attention to that person we finally choose. It may be a bright piece of clothing or perhaps fleeting eye contact – maybe by chance or maybe because he or she too is desperate for company. It may be an attitude, the way he holds his glass, a gesture she makes with her foot that indicates almost as much discomfort as we ourselves feel. It could be the glasses he wears, which immediately reveal a certain style, or perhaps the fact that she is browsing through a particular magazine that was on the table. It could be anything, but something, certainly, has caught our attention.

This is precisely what we call a “spearhead”: that thing that moves us to come into contact with a brand for the first time, which manages to initially penetrate the mind of the consumer and open the necessary space so that all other things can follow, in the same way that the point of the spear pierces the skin and opens the way for the rest.

The next time we need to grab a bite near the office, perhaps we will try out that burger from the new restaurant. When we walk in, maybe we will discover a bright, warm and friendly space. We will notice the decoration. We will talk with the waiter, who will confirm that the house burger is a magnificent choice, but that if we are in the mood for something else, today’s special is a steak with vegetables, also very tasty. As we wait for him to bring us our food, we discover that the paper tablecloth is actually a sort of treasure map recounting everything about the restaurant’s history and products through stories and illustrations. When the waiter brings us our drink and our burger, we realize that the time has flown by and that while we were waiting we learned that the beef comes from a free-range calf from the Pyrenees raised on the farm belonging to the father of the boy who dreamed of one day opening a restaurant in Barcelona.

Likewise, the woman who began as just a pretty dress will, after a few minutes of conversation, have become Isabel, an engineer from Seville who came to Barcelona to work in one of the most important offices of Hewlett Packard in the world, and who has a very endearing Andalusian accent when she speaks Catalan. We feel comfortable because she has endless topics of conversation up her sleeve, and we cannot help but feel a little bit envious when she explains that her work enables her to travel all over the world, which is her true dream.

On a street lined with restaurants and at a party full of people, the house burger and the pretty dress were the spearheads that made us choose that particular restaurant and that particular person above all other options. Beyond that first impression that pushed us to make contact, we were able to find out much more: we were able to establish emotional relationships and even discover their core values and their dreams and share them.

False Promises

In the battle to win over consumers, brands often go in with their guns blazing. They hoard and then try to say everything at once. They besiege us with lines that do not translate into reality: “Now is the time,” “Let’s talk,” “People serving people,” “What are you waiting for?” “At your side,” “Always at your side,” etc. – a never-ending list of slogans that are imitated, confused and confusing, and to which we have become somewhat immune. They are already failing to have an effect. As consumers, we have suffered so many disappointments that all of these grand propositions that do not really translate into instrumental or emotional values, let alone core or superior values, frustrate and harden us – and make us non-believers with no faith left.

How can a bank, for example, say “Let’s talk” if I have to stand in line for an hour to complete a simple transaction? How can a company say “At your side” if, in order to speak with a representative, I have to spend ages on the phone with an interactive voice response system? How can another ask “What are you waiting for?” if, when I decide to try its services, I realize that nothing is as promised? Dear brands, please know this: we consumers are immune to grand propositions that do not translate into great realities. An advertisement or slogan may catch our attention for a moment, but if, when we follow through, we realize that it is meaningless, your brand will be put into the same basket as all the others.

If, on the other hand, we can, as companies, identify something that we are or can be the best in the world at, we will have within our reach something much better than blazing guns: we will have a spear that we can throw with much greater precision and which will allow us to differentiate ourselves and truly penetrate people’s souls.

The dream, the core values, are very difficult to communicate by themselves, precisely because they are intangible and difficult to see. We need this spearhead to catch the attention of people to whom we may then transfer the rest.

As we have said, one of the advantages of having a dream is that it helps us focus everyone’s effort in a single direction. And this focus makes it possible to discover, definitively, everything that might differentiate us from our competitors – that which we can be the best in the world at.

The aim of doing one thing better than anyone else is today a requirement because when there is a clear direction, the same effort produces much more and the results are clearly better.

Perhaps we cannot achieve the objective in a single day, but throughout the journey we will observe that, increasingly, the competitors who have not chosen this path will become a distant blur.

Be the Best at What?

Once we have understood the urgent need to become better at one thing than anyone else in the world, here comes the big question: At what?

Before analyzing the process by which we come to discover our spearhead, it must be very clear to us that this “something” we speak of may be found in any area, from the purely instrumental (making the best car in the world, manufacturing the best pens, serving the best burger), to the emotional (making us feel better than any other brand does when we visit its restaurant or store, when we talk with its customer service team, when we reach out and find it ready to help us), to even the core values (when its commitment to happiness, to innovation, to making our lives easier is what catches our attention from the start).

La Fageda

There is one company that is exemplary in this regard because its leaders knew how to identify and promote that which – to a greater extent than even they could imagine – would become the true spearhead of the brand. It is not the case of a major multinational, but rather of a small social initiative founded in 1982 in Catalonia – in Olot, the capital of La Garrotxa. Psychologist Cristóbal Colón began an uncertain business venture with the aim of increasing the labor integration of people with mental illness in the region, convinced that work is a powerful tool in improving the lives of individuals with these conditions. At that time, there was nothing beyond that initial dream. Nor was it very clear what the new company would actually produce.

In this context, he requested an audience with the mayor of Olot, who was perplexed by this young psychologist so full of hopes but with no clear proposal. Here was a psychologist who wanted to start a company formed by people with mental illnesses, no investment capacity, and with the support of the Salt psychiatric hospital as a sole guarantee. Years later, when that first conversation was very far behind them and the strange initiative had succeeded in becoming a competitive reality, the mayor told Colón: “You were able to carry out the project because you had not studied economics […]. Yes, I’m convinced that you were able to do it because you didn’t know that it was impossible.” Cristóbal Colón, aware of the truth of these words, makes it clear that his company has one basic ingredient that has made everything possible despite the lack of previous knowledge and business experience: a dream. In his own words: “Dreaming has been essential in being able to do what we have done.”

What they created is La Fageda, a non-profit social initiative cooperative that today employs almost 300 people, the large majority of whom suffer from some sort of intellectual disability or even from a severe mental disorder. The story of La Fageda has gone through many different chapters, in which little by little Cristóbal Colón and his team discovered the activities through which they could make the business grow. The activity that has made them what they are today is the manufacture of yogurt, entering into a market in which the competition had names as powerful as Danone (marketed in the United States as Dannon) and Yoplait. Armed with good values, La Fageda began producing yogurt using the milk that, until then, it had been producing on a farm it managed. Following intense effort, it was able to create a very high-quality, good-tasting product using a more artisanal manufacturing process and source than the other brands.

Cristóbal Colón and his team, which by then had been trained on issues of business management, found themselves facing a dilemma when planning the marketing strategy for La Fageda. The simplest thing would have been to take advantage of the social history that lies behind the yogurt to attract the attention of the public. But after much consideration, they decided not to go the route of so-called “social marketing.” There were several reasons for this. On the one hand, they feared that people might distrust a product manufactured by people with intellectual disabilities or severe mental illnesses. Above all, however, the reticence came from the fact that this type of marketing would require an internal incoherence that they could not and would not allow. In La Fageda they do not refer to their employees as having disabilities, but rather as having “different abilities.” Their positive focus is on what their employees can do, not on what they “cannot” do. If this is the reality in which they operate and that they communicate internally in their everyday affairs, if this is what they believe above all else and what makes their project constructive, based on the idea that everyone can make a very useful contribution in the workplace, then how could they possibly tell the outside world that they should buy this yogurt to help the “poor disabled people” who make them? The decision fell under its own weight: social marketing was not a valid path in the case of La Fageda.

Today, Cristóbal Colón looks back and sees that it was the right strategy: “People buy our yogurt and pay a little more for it simply because they like it more. It is afterwards, upon being told that La Fageda is a social project, that they become our clients for life.” Contrary to what would have been tempting for anyone looking to publicize the La Fageda brand, the spearhead was not its social project, the company’s core values, but rather its consumer product, its chief instrumental value. La Fageda makes the best yogurt (in fact, studies such as those published in a magazine by Consum indicate that their bifidus yogurts are the best on the market according to analysts and consumers) and people pay more for them because they believe them to be better.

Today, La Fageda is the third best-selling yogurt brand in Catalonia. It manufactures 45 million individual containers of yogurt per year (which it sells at a price that is about 40% higher than that of the market leader), and it saw a turnover of €11.5 million its last fiscal year. La Fageda has a spearhead: its yogurt (an instrumental value), which is the first point of contact and that which gives it the opportunity to share its emotional and core values with its customers, revealing its true dream and garnering loyalty from those who identify with its ideology.

Pike Place

The spearhead, therefore, is not necessarily what it may seem to be a priori. An illustrative case at the opposite end of the spectrum to La Fageda is found in the Pike Place fish market in Seattle, Washington. Obviously, those who manage the market are concerned with ensuring that their fish stalls have the highest quality raw material, but if the sales at the Pike Place Fish Market are the highest around, it is not primarily because they have the best fish, but rather because they have the best way of selling fish, i.e., the best way of relating to their customers. This is true to such an extent that the company’s corporate philosophy inspired the documentary Fish! and a corresponding range of books from creator John Christensen.

In his first visit to the Seattle market, Christensen was fascinated by the way in which the workers performed their tasks, a truly dynamic and entertaining sight in which they would even throw and pass the fish around as if they were jugglers. The good attitude and liveliness emanating from the fish stands attracted the attention of customers, and employees would give each individual their full attention, cracking jokes or performing pirouettes to bring smiles to their customers’ faces. Christensen studied the case and found that this happy atmosphere had a very positive impact on the growth of sales. From his observations he ended up marking out and developing the Fish! philosophy, which has been implemented in all types of organizations, institutions and businesses to improve their results, and which basically encompasses four key concepts:

• Be playful: Have fun and get customers to feel that they too can have fun while they are with you.
• Brighten up their day: When you talk with customers, look them in the eye and focus all of your attention on them. Get them to feel unique, special.
• Be truly present: No more being physically present but mentally distant. Pay attention to what you are doing; your involvement will influence your colleagues.
• Choose your attitude: Every morning you choose the attitude with which you will confront the day. Whether you are friendly or unpleasant is up to you. Make the best decision.

In this fish market, then, the spearhead is not what one might think, i.e., that it is offering the best product. (Clearly, however, they do offer top-quality fish, because if not, being the friendliest and most outgoing fishmongers in the world would not get them these kinds of results.) The real spearhead of the Pike Place Fish Market is their way of relating to customers, a work culture that has ended up inspiring a philosophy that is now shared by other companies throughout the world thanks to the books and lectures of John Christensen.

The Spearhead in Everyday Life

These are just two examples that we consider to be particularly representative of companies that have understood this and that have discovered what they are the best in the world at. And they do not stop there; they strive in their everyday activities to find new things that they can do better than anyone else.

Could we provide more examples? Well, of course. Identifying companies that have managed to find their spearhead is not complicated, precisely because being the best in the world at one thing is something that makes us stand out from the rest.

We can see it at the local, national and international level. We can find examples of these brands in any sector of activity, whether they be huge, large, small or tiny companies. If we try to make a list, we will find them in every category and in every combination. Let us consider ones we run into on a typical day.

We get up early. Still half asleep, we head to the bathroom sink. The collection of products we use to get ready in the morning is reminiscent of a life sentence. The Dove soap and body lotion are hers and the Nivea is his. Both brands have managed to convert this specialization in a target into their spearhead. The real woman feels perfectly represented in the products that the Dove brand has created for her. She wants to love herself as she is, because she is already fantastic. For him, Nivea has managed to be the brand that has best understood that the man of today is more concerned with his appearance but that he is still a man: he has little patience and is pretty indulgent with his own physical defects. That is why Nivea has created a series of top-quality products for him that are also quick and easy to apply, fitting perfectly with his lifestyle. The kids’ cabinet is full of Johnson & Johnson products. They are clearly high-quality products that we also purchase because of our emotional links with the values that the brand has transmitted to us over the years. The real spearhead of Johnson & Johnson is the way in which all of its workforce and all the people involved feel linked to the brand and its values. This link is precisely the spearhead of the company. This tight ship of values influences the credibility and coherence of everything that Johnson & Johnson does and generates, among other things, consumer confidence.

We have finished getting ready and we go to the kitchen to have some breakfast. In the fridge we find another one of those lifetime brands, Danone, although what they now offer us is not only yogurt, but also a whole range of functional foods designed to help us in specific aspects of our health. An absolute obsession with healthy eating is the spearhead of Danone, which, in pursuing its aim to become the best in the world in this area, has developed a new category of products that actively contributes to achieving this objective.

Today we have to travel for work accompanied by a very important client of ours, so the company has reserved a Taxi Class taxi to take us to the airport. For certain clients and on certain occasions like this one, Taxi Class is without a doubt the best taxi service in the city. The taxi drivers are more polite and efficient, they have the best cars and keep them in the best condition, and they provide maximum punctuality and availability, as well as total comfort because we do not even have to pay for the ride since it will be charged directly to the company.

At Barcelona Airport we take an air shuttle to Madrid, and during the flight we chat with our client about the differences between Spanish airlines and those of other countries. We discover that we coincide in preferring Southwest Airlines, which we have both used at some point during our trips in the United States, to any other low-cost carrier. Southwest Airlines has managed to make its relationship with its customer into its spearhead, to the extent that its case has been studied and reviewed widely in publications such as the Harvard Business Review. In the HBR article, the analysis concluded that the incredible results of this airline, which took off at a time in which the country’s aeronautical sector was deep in crisis, lay in the satisfaction of travelers, who received unbeatable treatment from a highly motivated crew.

We arrive in Madrid and another Taxi Class taxi is waiting for us at the airport to take us to our destination. We have an intense meeting ahead of us and, when we arrive, we are grateful to see they have put together a few bottles of Font Vella water and some small snacks to abate our hunger. We pick up one of the bottles and, as we drink from it, we get the feeling that in addition to taking away our thirst, it is cleansing us from the inside out. What Font Vella has done is turn health into its spearhead, leaving the traditional fight to be “the purest,” “from the best spring” or “from the highest mountain” that most bottlers participate it. We ponder this while placing the Font Vella bottle on the table and drawing another spearheaded object from our briefcase: a Moleskine notebook. Most of us know that these notebooks are replicas of those used by great intellectuals like Ernest Hemingway, but beyond the anecdote, we all agree that Moleskine is a brand that has managed to do something better than anyone else in the world: it has led us to rediscover the pleasure of writing by hand. In a highly digitized age, Moleskine has managed to bring back the romanticism of handwriting.

It has been a long day, and after leaving the office and saying good-bye to our client we relax by taking a stroll through downtown Madrid.

Passing through the Marqués de Salamanca square, our eyes are drawn to the commotion coming from the door of a store whose name we cannot pronounce and which we have never seen before. We move closer and instantly understand the congregation of young people in the doorway of this brand, Abercrombie & Fitch, which until now had been unknown in Spain. Standing there are two individuals in their underwear who appear to be models – two sculpted bodies (one male and the other female) waiting for someone to enter the store and buy something with which to cover them up. No, their job is rather to catch the attention of everyone passing by the store and to allow themselves to be photographed with anyone who comes out of the door with an Abercrombie & Fitch bag. The excitement is so palpable that we cannot help but go inside. There, we find a store/show in which, in addition to selling clothes, they play music at full volume and project videos. Male and female models tend to shoppers while flashing huge smiles and, when they are not busy with customers, they dance around to ensure a lively environment. The spearhead of Abercrombie & Fitch, beyond the quality of its clothing and the modernity of its collections, is its way of attracting the public; it has converted a visit to its store into a real experience. In all of its locations around the world, that is the symbol of the brand.

We leave the store – without a bag and therefore without a photo with the models – and decide to look for further excitement in the other stores in the area. Just a few steps away our attention is again captured by a sign and a storefront, but this time it is because we deduce that this Culinarium will be a place dedicated to all sorts of knickknacks for the kitchen, a hobby that we have been cultivating in recent years. In the middle of the large store we spot a display for Lekué, a brand that has revolutionized the way we cook at home with its silicone molds designed for just about everything. We have a good collection of these products at home already, but we cannot help but add to it the small cup for making countless recipes for poached eggs. This brand has managed to make healthy, accessible (and clean!) cooking its spearhead. People who had never before even fried an egg are now preparing salmon and vegetables en papillote without a second thought. As we pay for the silicone egg cup, we think about the revolution that this innovation has led in the kitchen. Through an association of ideas our minds turn to Ferran Adrià, the chef who has himself become a brand and whose spearhead is without a doubt found in innovation, in always being a step ahead.

We continue our stroll through Madrid on our way to the hotel. The Gran Via is as we always remembered it, a river of people illuminated by neon lights advertising the shows that spice up Madrid’s nightlife. Tonight’s billboard displays another name that has become a brand: Madonna, the Queen of Pop, the artist who has managed to adapt better than anyone in the world to the times and to the aesthetics, attitudes and rebellions of the moment.

Walking down the Gran Via, we finally arrive at our hotel. It is an H10, a hotel chain that has managed to convey the concept of excellence at the best price with accuracy and precision: never too much, never too little, what is there is perfectly adequate without playing up appearances, and if there is anything you need, you can get it simply by asking for it and paying the corresponding surcharge. Again, as Leonardo da Vinci said, “Simplification is the ultimate sophistication,” and this maxim seems to be the spearhead of this hotel chain.

For a trip like today’s, this is the best place we could stay the night. While we turn on the hot water in anticipation of one of those showers that helps us shrug off the day, we think about an anecdote we heard a long time ago about another hotel chain, the Ritz Carlton. It seems that for these establishments, their obsession with knowing their guests and making them feel at home has grown to the point that if you have ever spent a night at a Ritz Carlton, all of your preferences, tastes and desires are recorded so that they can be provided the next time you stay in one of their hotels, even if it is on the other side of the world. This specific client’s anecdote explained that after having spent a couple of nights at the Ritz Carlton in Barcelona, he had to travel to Singapore for business and he again stayed at this hotel chain. There he found that they not only greeted him by name, but that they knew what kind of pillow stuffing he preferred, what his favorite gin was and which tonic he had with it, and that they could not offer him dishes from the menu that contained nuts because he was allergic.

While these thoughts have run through our mind we have showered and put on the hotel bathrobe and slippers. In the menu of TV channels we browse through once we are finally snug in bed, we find two more examples of how to do one thing better than anyone else in the world: Disney, the brand that has managed to turn the entire child entertainment universe into its spearhead, from cartoons to theme parks, to audiovisual media, to the merchandising sector and so on, and National Geographic, which is the best in the world at dealing with nature as content of any type.

Today, however, we do not feel like watching television and we decide to read for a while to help us fall asleep. We grab our e-reader from our suitcase and visit the page of Amazon, i.e., the sales website that has been able to take advantage of the power of recommendation better than anyone else in the world. Since they know our tastes, we purchase the novel that they are recommending without a second thought. When it comes time to pay, we realize that tomorrow we need to make a bank transfer that cannot be put off any longer. Luckily, we use a bank that is concerned about having a better relationship with its customers and that has done everything in its power to make transactions like this as easy as can be. We switched from the bank we had been using all our lives to ING Direct precisely because we have observed that they work unabashedly in our favor, because their interest in their customers is not only a slogan in their ads but also a tangible reality, and one that we benefit from in many everyday situations such as this one. With the latest Ken Follett novel downloaded onto the e-reader, we let the act of reading make for a placid transfer between wakefulness and sleep, putting an end to a long and tiring day.

View From a Different Standpoint

Every day, in any given situation, we interact with all of these types of brands, some more closely than others. Some of them have managed to find at least their first spearhead, that obsession, that determination to be the best in the world at something. And we say “their first” because this attitude, this drive to be the best at something, can become a vice – albeit it a healthy one – for a brand.

But for the time being let us stay on the subject of this first spearhead. Each of the companies that we have already cited has done the hardest thing, which is to start. And it is true that in companies’ everyday affairs, it is very difficult to find time to sit down and think, to have the breadth of vision needed to put things in perspective.

Our experience tells us that the kind of introspection that is needed to be able to visualize horizons such as the spearhead cannot be done in the same environment in which we face the difficulties of our everyday affairs. A famous quote by Albert Einstein puts this very clearly: “Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.”

Most of the companies we have examined already had all the answers within them; they just did not know how to ask the right questions to uncover them.

In the 4th century B.C., the philosopher Socrates was getting under the skin of his disciples with a system that may in some way be related to how we bring to light things that are hidden. Socratic Maieutics, based on the art of dialectics, was used to guide the minds of those who believed they did not know something so that they could find the answer for themselves. Socrates brought to the field of philosophy a word that originally belonged to medical vocabulary; in ancient Greek, “Maieutics” comes from “Obstetrics,” i.e., the art of giving birth. Socrates somehow helped his disciples, who believed themselves to be ignorant, “give birth” to the truth within themselves.

It is a very curious phenomenon that we are so often incapable of understanding what is happening to us and yet have no problem determining what is happening to others.

Let us consider the example of educating our children. We find it very hard to evaluate why our child behaves the way he or she does. If things are not working, we ask ourselves what we are doing wrong, but we are not able to figure it out. And it is not that we are incapable of self-criticism. It is not a case of “There is none so blind as he who does not want to see.” In reality, it is common for us to be so immersed in our relationships with our children, so conditioned by the everyday activities and by all of our family history that it is really difficult to see what is going on in our home. We lack perspective; the situation we are immersed in swallows us completely, does not let us see clearly.

Nevertheless, all of the perspicacity that we lack when analyzing what is going on in our own home appears all of a sudden and with greater strength than ever when we analyze what is going on in others’ homes. What other parents do well and what they do poorly seems to us to be all too obvious. How can they not see it? It seems impossible that this or that parent does not see that they are making mistakes with their children. And, at the same time, it is easy for us to identify those parents who do it well and to admire them for managing to maintain a peaceful and happy family life.

The situation is analogous in the business world. When looking at our own situation we cannot see beyond the here and now. The short term besieges us. Our daily affairs do not allow us to raise our heads and look to the horizon. The high volume of everyday stimuli distracts us and does not allow us to focus. Our to-do list is constantly being altered by contingencies that must be resolved in order to maintain the company’s production rate: a broken photocopy machine, a computer system failure, a change in a meeting time, a colleague who is out sick, a customer who needs us, etc. Many days we go home with the feeling of having spent the entire day solving unforeseen problems and without having done anything on our agenda.

This is the “level of thinking” in which we work every day and, as Albert Einstein said, we cannot change anything from here.

We have to learn to get out of this environment and distance ourselves from the everyday pressures. We have to somehow purge all of this extra weight in order to truly focus on something else.

The objective, as we have mentioned, is to be able to see our organization in the same way that we are able to see things from the outside that appear obvious to us. The simplest way to achieve this is to start training the mind to learn how to analyze external situations. If well directed, this can allow us to reach the point in which we can turn the analysis inwards toward our own company. In short, we can learn to look at ourselves with the same clarity with which we view others.

We have said that in order to see our dream, we must learn to think big. And thinking big means seeing things in perspective. It means seeing the magnificence of the landscape beyond the forest in which we find ourselves. This astuteness is also essential for discovering what we do better than any other company in the world. And it is no exaggeration to say that we feel truly liberated when we finally understand our company’s place, when we discover its strong points, the things that make it stand out from the rest and that which gives it a distinct personality, when we stumble upon our dream and the spearhead that will allow us to transfer it to the world. We see more clearly and feel as though a weight has been lifted off our shoulders; suddenly, we know why we do the things we do. Everything suddenly makes much more sense.

People who have suffered a dramatic chapter in their lives usually say that the accident, the death of a loved one or the illness that they overcame somehow “transformed” them. They also often say that from that moment on, they “understood” many things and that their vision of life “changed radically.”

Despite the obvious differences, key moments that transform us are also possible in the business environment. And they do not have to be traumatic moments; on the contrary, they can be supremely gratifying experiences that show us something that we simply did not know that we knew.