Checkers Strategy: Why Most Brands Are Playing the Wrong Game

A checkers strategy is a competitive approach where a brand makes reactive, incremental moves in response to what competitors are doing, rather than setting its own direction based on customer insight and market opportunity. It looks like strategy. It rarely is.

Most marketing teams play checkers without realising it. They match a competitor’s price, copy a channel mix, react to a product launch. Each move feels rational in isolation. Over time, the pattern adds up to a business that is permanently one step behind.

What Does Playing Checkers Actually Look Like in Marketing?

Checkers is a game of mirrors. Every move is a response to the last move. The board gets smaller, the options narrow, and both players end up in the same corner fighting over the same squares.

In marketing, checkers looks like this. A competitor launches a loyalty programme, so you build one. A rival cuts prices in Q4, so you match it. A new entrant starts running performance ads on a channel you had not prioritised, so you redirect budget there. A category leader repositions around sustainability, so you update your brand values to include it.

None of these decisions are necessarily wrong. The problem is the logic behind them. When the primary reason for a strategic move is “because they did it,” you are not making strategy. You are playing checkers.

I spent years running agencies and watching clients present competitive analysis as the foundation for their go-to-market plans. The analysis was often excellent. Detailed, accurate, well-presented. But it was being used as a substitute for thinking, not as an input to it. The implicit assumption was: if we know what competitors are doing, we know what we should do. That is a checkers mindset, and it produces checkers outcomes.

If you want a broader framework for how go-to-market decisions should actually be structured, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the full picture, from positioning to channel selection to growth planning.

Why Checkers Feels Like Strategy When It Isn’t

There is a reason checkers thinking is so persistent. It feels responsible. It feels grounded in evidence. It feels like due diligence.

When you can point to a competitor who launched a feature and saw their market share grow, copying that feature feels like a safe bet. When a rival’s channel mix appears to be generating results, shifting your own budget in that direction feels like smart adaptation. When the whole category is moving toward a particular type of messaging, staying out of it feels reckless.

This is the comfort trap at its most seductive. Competitive parity is presented as strategic alignment. Imitation is dressed up as market intelligence. And because everyone else is playing the same game, there is safety in numbers. If it goes wrong, at least you were doing what the market was doing.

I have sat in enough boardrooms to know that this logic is almost impossible to argue against in the moment. The CFO wants to know why you are not doing what the market leader is doing. The CEO has just seen a competitor’s campaign and wants to know when yours is launching. The pressure to match, mirror, and respond is relentless. And the people applying that pressure are not wrong to ask the questions. They are wrong to accept imitation as the answer.

The BCG framework on commercial transformation makes a useful distinction between optimising what exists and building what comes next. Most checkers strategies are optimisation plays dressed up as growth plans. They improve your position on a board that is already being defined by someone else.

The Convergence Problem: What Happens When Everyone Plays Checkers

When multiple players in a category all play checkers against each other, the result is convergence. Products start to look the same. Positioning starts to sound the same. Channels, creative formats, price architecture, loyalty mechanics: they all drift toward a category average.

This is not a theoretical risk. It is the default state of most mature categories. Walk through a supermarket and look at the own-brand ranges. Visit the websites of three competing SaaS platforms in any vertical. Read the brand purpose statements of five FMCG companies. The convergence is striking, and it is the direct result of years of competitive mirroring.

When a category converges, the only levers left are price and distribution. Margins compress. Customer acquisition costs rise because everyone is fishing in the same pools with the same bait. Brand loyalty weakens because there is no meaningful reason to prefer one option over another. Growth becomes a function of outspending the competition rather than out-thinking them.

I watched this play out in real time during a turnaround I led at an agency that had been chasing every competitor move for three years. By the time I arrived, the positioning was indistinguishable from four other agencies in the same space. The pitch deck could have been anyone’s. The only differentiator was price, and we were not the cheapest. Rebuilding from that position required ignoring the competition almost entirely for twelve months and rebuilding the proposition from the customer’s perspective. It was uncomfortable. It worked.

What Playing Chess Looks Like Instead

The chess analogy matters here. Chess players think multiple moves ahead. They do not just react to the last piece that moved. They hold a model of the whole board, anticipate how the game might develop, and make moves that create future options rather than just responding to current threats.

In marketing terms, playing chess means building your go-to-market strategy from the outside in, starting with customer understanding, market structure, and where genuine opportunity exists, rather than from the inside out, starting with what competitors are doing and working backward.

It means being willing to occupy positioning that looks different from the category norm, not for the sake of being different, but because the customer insight supports it. It means making channel decisions based on where your audience is and what they need, not where your rivals have already set up camp. And it means accepting that some of your moves will not make sense to observers in the short term, because they are designed to create advantages that compound over time.

The market penetration frameworks that Semrush outlines are worth reading in this context. Penetration as a growth lever requires a clear view of who you are not yet reaching and why. That is a chess question, not a checkers question. Checkers asks: what did the competitor do to grow their share? Chess asks: which customers are not being well-served by anyone in this category, and what would it take to reach them?

How to Identify Checkers Moves in Your Own Strategy

Most go-to-market plans contain checkers moves that have been rationalised as something else. The tell is in the justification. When you trace a strategic decision back to its origin, what do you find?

If the primary evidence for a decision is competitor behaviour, that is a checkers move. If the channel was chosen because a rival is using it successfully, that is checkers. If the positioning was updated because the category leader shifted theirs, that is checkers. If the product roadmap is being driven by feature parity with a competitor rather than by customer need, that is checkers.

A useful diagnostic is to ask: what would we do differently if our main competitor did not exist? If the answer is “not much,” your strategy is more dependent on their decisions than it should be. If the answer reveals a genuinely different set of priorities, you have a starting point for rebuilding on firmer ground.

The second diagnostic is to look at your measurement framework. What you track shapes what you do. If your primary metrics are share-of-voice relative to competitors, share of search, price index against rivals, you are building a measurement system that will always pull you back toward checkers. You will optimise for competitive parity rather than absolute customer value.

Early in my career I was obsessed with lower-funnel performance metrics. Conversion rates, cost per acquisition, return on ad spend. They felt concrete and defensible. What I underestimated was how much of that performance was capturing demand that already existed, demand that would have converted anyway through some channel or another. The real growth question, the chess question, was about the customers who were not yet in the funnel at all. What would it take to reach them? That required a completely different kind of thinking, and a willingness to invest in things that did not show up cleanly in the performance dashboard.

The Role of Competitive Intelligence in a Chess Strategy

None of this means ignoring competitors. Competitive intelligence is a legitimate and important input to strategy. The distinction is between using it as an input and using it as a driver.

Knowing what competitors are doing helps you understand the current state of the category, identify where the market is crowded, spot gaps they are not addressing, and anticipate how they might respond to your moves. That is all useful. What it cannot do is tell you where the genuine opportunity is, because competitors are also playing checkers against each other and may be collectively missing something significant.

The best competitive analysis I have seen treats competitor behaviour as a symptom of underlying market forces, not as a blueprint to follow. When a competitor launches a new product, the interesting question is not “should we build something similar?” but “what customer need are they trying to address, and are they addressing it well?” If they are doing it well, you are probably too late to that particular game. If they are doing it badly, there may be an opportunity to do it better. If the customer need is real but they are solving the wrong problem, there may be an opportunity they have not seen yet.

That kind of analysis requires getting close to customers, not just close to competitor press releases. Forrester’s intelligent growth model makes the point that sustainable growth requires understanding the structural drivers of demand, not just the surface-level competitive dynamics. Checkers players read the board. Chess players understand why the pieces are where they are.

Checkers in Channel Strategy: The Comfort Trap at Scale

Channel strategy is where checkers thinking does some of its most consistent damage. The logic is seductive: if a competitor is investing heavily in a channel and growing, that channel must be working. So you invest there too. Then another competitor follows. Then another. Within eighteen months, the channel is crowded, costs have risen, and the early-mover advantage has evaporated.

This pattern has played out on paid social, on programmatic display, on influencer marketing, on podcast advertising, and on connected TV. In each case, the channel was genuinely effective for the early movers. By the time the checkers players arrived, the economics had changed. The channel still worked, but it worked less well and cost more.

The chess version of channel strategy starts with a different question: where is our specific audience, and what are they doing there? Not “where are our competitors advertising?” but “where are the people we need to reach, and what would be genuinely useful or interesting to them in that context?”

This requires audience understanding that goes deeper than demographic profiles and purchase intent signals. It requires knowing what your audience is thinking about before they are thinking about your category. That is harder to measure and harder to justify in a budget review. It is also where the genuine channel advantages tend to live, at least until everyone else catches up.

The growth hacking examples that Crazy Egg documents are instructive here. The ones that worked did so because they found an underused mechanism for reaching a specific audience. The ones that failed were mostly imitations of successful tactics applied in contexts where the underlying conditions were different. Tactics are not transferable. The thinking behind them sometimes is.

When Checkers Is the Right Call

There are situations where matching a competitor move is the correct decision. Not every reactive response is a failure of strategy.

If a competitor makes a move that threatens to undermine a core part of your proposition, you may need to respond quickly even if the response is not perfectly calibrated. If a rival launches a product that addresses a genuine customer need you have been ignoring, building something similar is not checkers, it is catching up on a gap in your own offering. If a new channel emerges and a competitor demonstrates that your shared audience is there, moving into that channel is rational, not reactive.

The difference is in the quality of the decision-making. A checkers move made consciously, with a clear understanding of why you are making it and what you expect it to achieve, is a different thing from a checkers move made reflexively because the alternative feels uncomfortable. The former is tactical pragmatism. The latter is strategic drift.

I judged the Effie Awards for a period, and one of the things that struck me was how often the shortlisted work had been made in markets where the brand was not the category leader. The leaders, by and large, were playing a different game, defending territory rather than claiming it. The challengers were the ones making interesting moves. Not because they were contrarian for its own sake, but because they had no choice but to think differently. Necessity forced them off the checkers board.

Building a Strategy That Can Hold Its Own Direction

The practical challenge is building a strategy that is genuinely competitor-informed but not competitor-led. That requires a few specific things.

First, a positioning that is grounded in customer truth rather than category convention. If your positioning could be adopted by a competitor without changing anything fundamental about their business, it is not a real positioning. It is a category claim. Real positioning reflects something specific about what you do, who you do it for, and why that matters to them in a way that is not easily replicated.

Second, a growth thesis that starts with audience rather than share. The question “how do we take share from competitor X?” is a checkers question. The question “which customers are not being well-served by anyone in this category, and what would it take to reach and convert them?” is a chess question. The second question is harder to answer, but the answers tend to be more durable. Semrush’s breakdown of growth examples shows how the most sustainable growth stories tend to start with audience insight rather than competitive response.

Third, a measurement framework that tracks absolute customer value rather than just relative competitive position. Share-of-voice and share-of-search are useful signals, but they are inherently comparative. They tell you how you are doing relative to the competition, not whether you are growing in absolute terms or delivering genuine value to customers. A strategy built on competitive metrics will always be pulled toward competitive behaviour.

Fourth, the organisational willingness to hold a position under pressure. This is the hardest part. When a competitor makes a bold move and the board asks why you are not responding, the answer “because our strategy does not require us to” needs to be backed by a clear and confident articulation of what your strategy actually is and why it is working. That requires genuine strategic clarity, not just a well-formatted plan document.

The Vidyard research on pipeline and revenue potential makes a related point about go-to-market teams: the biggest untapped opportunity is rarely in the channels and segments that are already being actively competed for. It is in the audiences and moments that everyone has decided are too difficult or too slow to convert. Those are exactly the places where a chess strategy tends to find its advantages.

If you are working through how to structure a go-to-market strategy that is genuinely built from customer insight rather than competitive reaction, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub is where I have pulled together the frameworks and thinking that I have found most useful across 20 years of doing this work.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

Frequently Asked Questions