How to Win at Marketing Mario Kart

Marketing is a never-ending race where new competitors can be added at any time and the track layout can change in a moment’s notice. If you’ve been idling at the starting line, your competitors are likely already well ahead, moving at full speed and doing everything possible to maintain and increase their lead. Despite this, many companies think that instead of accelerating and trying to close the gap, they can start slowly, test the waters at half speed, and somehow gain ground.

That’s not how racing works, and that’s not how marketing works either.

The Cost of Being Late to the Race

I spend most of my time analyzing go-to-market strategies and competitive landscapes. The same pattern emerges over and over: companies fundamentally misunderstand the speed of their competitors.

Here’s the reality – if your competitors have momentum and you’re standing still, the gap grows automatically. It’s not static. When I audit competitive positions, I routinely discover that organizations are years behind competitors they consider peers or even view as inferior.

Misunderstanding Your Engine Class

This gap between you and your competition is debt. The cost of misunderstanding the speed of your competitors is watching that debt compound daily.

Every month you spend knowing you should be investing but not knowing how to get started, waiting for the “right time,” or simply procrastinating is another month your competitors are building market share, establishing thought leadership, and strengthening their position. Their content is ranking higher, their brand recognition is growing, and their sales pipeline is expanding while you’re still in planning mode.

The math is unforgiving in competitive spaces: for every month you delay full commitment to your marketing strategy, you potentially add roughly three months to your catch-up timeline.

There Are No Shortcuts

No magical tactic will instantly put you ahead of competitors who’ve been executing consistently for years. No brilliant campaign will erase their established market presence overnight. No budget increase can compress the time required to build genuine market authority. I’ve actually had to tell clients that in order to reach their goals, they would have had to start 10 years ago.

Companies that fall behind often resort to competing on price because they’ve waited too long to build meaningful differentiation. This is the predictable outcome of incremental thinking in competitive markets.

How to Actually Compete

If you’re serious about competing, you need three things:

Competitive assessment: Understand exactly where your competitors are right now. Get specific metrics on their content output, social presence growth, and market activities. Gut feelings don’t work here.

Velocity measurement: Determine how fast they’re moving. Are they publishing daily? How rapidly are they expanding their team? What’s their pace of product releases or feature updates?

Acceleration plan: Map out what resources you need to exceed their pace. Matching their effort keeps you behind. You need to move significantly faster for an extended period to close the gap.

The Reality of Catching up

Incremental approaches fail in competitive markets. If your competitor invests $20,000 monthly in content marketing, spending $5,000 won’t help you catch up. It ensures you fall further behind.

Catching up requires moving dramatically faster than your competition until the gap closes. Not matching them. Not slightly outpacing them. Substantially outperforming them across multiple areas simultaneously.

Most companies aren’t prepared for this reality. They want gradual improvement when the situation demands aggressive acceleration.

When Does it End?

Clients often ask me: “When can we stop this aggressive pace?” The answer is simple: as soon as your competitors stop and agree that you’ve won.

Marketing isn’t a project with a clear finish line. It’s an ongoing competitive battle where the moment you ease up, someone else accelerates past you. Your competitors aren’t going to send you a memo announcing they’re taking a break from growing their business.

The companies that dominate markets understand this fundamental truth. They don’t sprint to a finish line and then coast. They maintain their pace because they know that market leadership is earned daily, not achieved once and kept forever.

Are You a Leader, a Competitor, or a Bystander?

You’re either genuinely competing or you’re not. There’s no middle ground in competitive markets.

Too many companies treat marketing like a casual effort when they’re actually in the middle of an intense competition for market share. While they’re “taking their time,” competitors are capturing the customers, talent, and opportunities that could have been theirs.

The gap isn’t static. It’s growing. Every day you operate at less than full capacity is another day that catching up becomes more expensive and time-consuming.

Stop hesitating. Start accelerating.