Branding and A.I.

The game GO is the oldest board game known to man. Similar to Chess, there are players across the globe who have dedicated their lives to mastering the strategy involved with playing. 

In 2015 Google created an A.I. bot and taught it to play GO and eventually pitted it against the greatest player in the world. 

The A.I. soundly beat the grandmaster four games to one driving the player into immediate and permanent retirement from the game.

But here’s where it gets interesting.

Google then pitted their A.I. against a complete novice who barely knew of the game’s nuances. The amateur beat the A.I. 14 games out of 15. 

The artificial intelligence simply wasn’t prepared for how this unpredictable, unrefined yet competitive player was going to attack it. 

This is the mentality of a true challenger brand.

Much like going to war with an A.I., when you’re challenging a large, established brand in your vertical the answer usually isn’t playing the game harder. It’s not a question of more SEO or more Social Media or more media spend. The answer is playing the game differently. 

At Decommoditized.com we don’t play by the rules. Instead, we make up a new set and play the game completely differently.

There’s a great Mark Twain quote that encapsulates this story and our mantra perfectly:

“The best swordsman in the world doesn’t need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn’t do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn’t prepared for him; he does the thing he ought not to do; and often it catches the expert out and ends him on the spot.”