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Podcast: HBR On Strategy
Episode: How Small Companies Compete with — and Beat — Big Ones
Description: In an era driven by network effects, smaller players struggle to compete against bigger platforms. The trick to gaining ground on a much larger rival, says Harvard Business School professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee, is choosing a strategy that can’t easily be imitated.
A good example is TaoBao’s strategy for displacing eBay in China. Back in 2007, eBay was the world’s largest consumer marketplace, and TaoBao was an underdog with bold new ideas about how to build trust with customers who were reluctant to shop online.
“In fact, the market that Taobao targeted ended up being so...