Hedgehogs and Vines in Marketing

In Jim Collin's classic business book "Good to Great", dozens of companies are analyzed to discover the characteristics and habits of great companies. One of his key discoveries is "The Hedgehog Concept" : simplifying a complex world into a single unifying idea that underlies and guides everything. He illustrates the idea with the story of the fox and the hedgehog. The fox is cunning, creative, sleek and able to devise complex strategies in pursuit of the hedgehog. The hedgehog, on the other hand, simply defends himself from the repeated attacks by rolling himself into an impenetrable prickly ball. The hedgehog always wins.

The idea is similar to my concept of the vine in VineWorks Marketing: all of the fruit that your company will ever bear must grow from a single vine. All of the energies and efforts must be with this underlying concept in mind. Any actions that take away energy from the core concept need to be pruned.

Defining your hedgehog concept is not easy and can't always be accomplished overnight. However, it is a worthy exercise. Once your underlying concept is defined, all of your marketing efforts should be viewed through the prism of this concept. If the event, promotion, advertisement or sponsorship does not feed the vine, then it needs to be eliminated. Your marketing efforts will be rewarded when your budgets and energies are unified toward a common goal.