Is it best to always be first? Not always.
Many people prefer Pepsi over Coca-Cola. A lot of customers swear by Apple and never use Microsoft products. Companies see a product and produce a different version all the time and they are often pretty successful.
This is the fast-follow philosophy: take a great product and make it better. And hundreds of companies are doing it right now.
The idea is that fast-following is the best way to leverage the success of competitors while reducing the financial risks of building innovations.
This article defines fast-follow, benefits, risks, and how it works with cybersecurity. By the end of this article, you’ll receive the motivation to imitate, not innovate in a smart way to reduce risks while reaping the rewards.
What Is Fast-Follow?
Fast-follow is the strategy of waiting for competitors to spend money on every stage of developing a new product and then quickly designing an imitation product to get a large proportion of the market share before the original company.
The key is speed because it relies on stealing consumer excitement in the fresh product from the original creator and translating it into sales.
Fast followers are the opposite of first-movers. First-movers create ground-breaking, fresh, and innovative ideas, while fast followers imitate first-movers and their products to their advantage.
Fast-follow works best in tech and retail. Why? These industries change and shift at breakneck speed. Innovation is equally as important in these rapidly moving industries as imitation. Different companies choose the two approaches, and both can benefit them and the industry’s health.
The Benefits of Fast-Follow
Although it is challenging to do it proficiently, fast-follow is very beneficial when you do it well. The first benefit is cost efficiency because you are using a premade idea, so you can skip a lot of steps and go straight to marketing and selling.
Cost Efficiency
R&D (research and development) is a time-consuming and costly process that involves many stages and iterations until a company arrives at a product it knows will sell and make a profit. If companies use the idea of another company, they bypass many steps and save a lot of resources they can use for the later stages, like marketing.
Reduced Risk
Developing new products comes with massive risks. What if all your money leads to nothing and the product flops? What if you run out of money for marketing because you exceeded the R&D budget and now have a great product nobody knows about?
One way to avoid all these risks in one streamlined way is to use the idea of a competitor. You can observe the popularity of the product, what you could improve about it, and how you can change it to fit a new audience. This approach has some risks, but it’s much more likely to succeed because you know the base product works and people want it.
Speed to Market
The final benefit is that you can get your product to market much more quickly than the competitor who developed the original idea.
Adapting is much faster than creating an idea from scratch, and saved time offers a huge competitive advantage. You can use this advantage to plan a smart marketing campaign and quickly bring your product to market to acquire a portion of the market share.
Fast-Follow in the Context of Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity is essential in all fast-follow strategies. Your competitive advantage lies in the surprise your competitors feel when they realise you developed a marketing campaign for a product based on theirs. Poor security can destroy this advantage because it can lead to other companies seeing your communications and knowing your next move.
When you adopt cybersecurity measures like using a VPN (virtual private network), you mitigate risks because this tool hides your IP address, making it harder for hackers to find you. It is especially important for remote workers who may not use work apps on secure networks.
Another important consideration is how you ensure that your cybersecurity is operating properly.
The best way to achieve this is using a security validation platform, which acts like an antivirus tool for a home computer but in a professional context and has more robust techniques to test vulnerabilities and uses updates for KEVs (Known Exploited Vulnerabilities) so the tools knows what gaps in security and types of cyberattack to look out for and fix.
Conclusion
The value of fast-following is huge. When you do it right. It looks easy but it requires specialist knowledge and the ability to understand and use agile methodologies to take an existing product and spin it into a new one at breakneck speed along with an effective marketing strategy that looks different to the competition’s.
The benefits of fast-follow are hard to ignore. It’s a cheaper, faster, lower risk way of making and selling products because all the time, money and risk happens on your competitor’s side.
Just remember one thing: Cybersecurity becomes even more crucial when you become a fast-follower. One slip and your competition knows your strategy and your advantage is gone. Invest in cybersecurity including a security validation platform to fast-follow with confidence and success.
