A big incumbent in a category is usually enough to scare people off entering it at all. Being first buys real advantages and pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone. But for those brave enough to try anyway, the instinct, especially in the tech space, is usually to reach for the one thing that feels provable: harder numbers than the incumbent's. That instinct makes sense on paper. It's just never been the whole game.
Peter Golder and Gerard Tellis tracked roughly 500 brands across 50 product categories and found that market pioneers, the literal first movers, failed 47% of the time and held onto long-term category leadership in just 4 of the 50 categories studied. The companies that did become lasting leaders were usually early followers, not pioneers, entering an average of 13 years after the pioneer. Our take: what actually separates them is a reason for people to care, something worth putting their money or their name behind, not a longer spec sheet.
Apple wasn't first
The example everyone reaches for is Apple and that's because Apple was almost never first to anything. MP3 players had existed for years before the iPod arrived in 2001. Jobs reached into his own jeans pocket, pulled the device out in front of the room, and said four words: '1,000 songs in your pocket'.
That trust didn't come from nowhere. Jobs had spent years building a persona to match the myth: soft-spoken, unhurried on stage, dressed the same at every keynote. He had gone barefoot around the office at Atari in the mid-1970s, kept a daily meditation practice, and identified more with Zen than with Silicon Valley long before Apple existed. Apple's own engineers had a name for what happened when he took the stage: the reality distortion field. None of this is a rule to copy. Zuckerberg and Gates both built some of the most valuable companies on earth without needing much stage presence at all. But for Jobs, personality wasn't decoration on top of the pitch: it was doing real work. By the time he reached into his own pocket in 2001, the room wasn't just watching a product. They were watching a man who had captivated them, the kind of presence that could hold up a stick of chewing gum and make the room want one.
'Steve has a reality distortion field.' … 'In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything.'
Bud Tribble in Walter Isaacson's "Steve Jobs"
Six years later, Apple did the same thing to the phone. Jobs opened not with a spec sheet but with what the device would be: 'a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device'. Then came the line that mattered: 'we're gonna reinvent the phone'. He put four rival smartphones on screen, the Motorola Q, the BlackBerry, the Palm Treo, the Nokia E62, and pointed out what they all had in common: keyboards and control buttons fixed in plastic. Apple's answer was to get rid of the buttons and use a screen instead. By the end of 2012, Apple was pulling in roughly 70% of the entire smartphone industry's profits.
Story is the lever
April Dunford, who has spent two decades positioning B2B technology companies, estimates 40% to 60% of B2B sales processes ending in no decision at all. Around half of those losses go not to a competing vendor but to whatever the buyer already uses (or to nothing). That gives the incumbent two advantages: familiarity and the switching costs (implementation, retraining, sunk investment) that come with change.
A newer company has neither of those advantages. One of the tools it can reach for is becoming distinct enough to be remembered. That doesn't require volume, and Jobs never went for fireworks. He simply broke the mould of what a tech executive was supposed to look and sound like, and that gave Apple an aura no spec sheet could touch. It's not the only lever a smaller company has, and it isn't the easiest one to pull, but it's one more tool in the kit.
That aura hasn't faded. Samsung still beats Apple on plenty of what would go on a spec sheet:
- Ships more phones worldwide
- Got to foldable phones years ago (Apple still hasn't announced one)
- Batteries that charge faster and last longer than an iPhone's
- A far wider product lineup, from budget to premium
Yet Apple still takes over 60% of the industry's profit on under 20% of the units sold, and owning one has become a status symbol Samsung has never managed to buy its way into. The persona Jobs built decades ago is still doing that work.