A razor startup that grew by refusing to fight Gillette head-on

Andy Katz-Mayfield stood at a drugstore counter waiting for a clerk to unlock the case where razor blades were kept, the kind of everyday errand nobody thinks twice about until the total came to twenty-five dollars for a four-pack of cartridges and a can of shaving cream. He remembers the specific feeling of being taken advantage of. That irritation became the seed of Harry's, the shaving brand he built with his friend Jeff Raider.

At the time, Gillette held roughly 80 percent of the razor market, with Schick and Bic trailing at a distance, according to the account Kotler and Armstrong give of the industry. Taking on that kind of giant head-on would have been a losing fight. So Harry's didn't try. Instead, the founders targeted a specific segment the giants had left largely unattended: people who wanted quality razors, a simpler buying experience, and a fair price, sold directly online rather than through a crowded drugstore shelf.

This is what Kotler and Armstrong mean by market segmentation and targeting: dividing a large, varied market into groups with distinct needs, and choosing the group you can serve best rather than trying to please everyone. Harry's also had to answer what the authors call the positioning question: why should a customer buy this brand instead of a competitor's? Its answer was a step above the bargain feel of some other online razor sellers, with well-designed products, honest pricing, and blades made by a respected German manufacturer that Harry's eventually bought outright to control quality and supply.

Gillette didn't ignore the threat. It launched its own online store, sued Harry's over patents, and ran ads questioning the loyalty of Harry's customers. Every one of those moves either failed or backfired, and Gillette dropped the lawsuit after the claims proved false. Over the following decade, Gillette's share of the market slid from around 80 percent to roughly half, while niche brands like Harry's and rival Dollar Shave Club, later bought by Unilever, kept growing.

Harry's stayed disciplined about the niche it had chosen rather than chasing every market Gillette still held. As co-founder Jeff Raider put it, the company would rather do three things incredibly well than a hundred things not so well. That, more than any single tactic, is the real lesson Kotler and Armstrong draw from the story: a well-chosen segment, served with a clear and honest positioning, can out-manoeuvre a giant that's spread across everyone.

Study your market's biggest competitors and find the group of customers whose needs they're currently serving poorly or ignoring altogether. Once you've spotted that segment, get able to say, in one honest sentence, exactly why a customer should pick you over the obvious, bigger alternative. Resist the pull to expand too early; get very good at serving that one segment before you even think about competing broadly. And when the larger competitor finally notices you and reacts, whether with lower prices, legal threats, or a copycat product, hold your positioning steady instead of panicking into a price war you were never built to win. Being small and focused can beat being big and scattered.