This marketing strategy is based on the classic battlefield strategy that has its roots deep in antiquity going as far back as the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC where the Greeks tricked the Persians into thinking it was a normal pitched battle, but ended up moving their troops in a u-formation around the Persian army forcing their retreat. The objective here is to outflank your opponents forcing them to fight a battle on multiple fronts with the same resources they were prepared to use for a single-front battle. In a pitched handheld weapon / hand-to-hand battle this works well because on the flanks one soldier is fighting against two or three of your soldiers allowing a smaller army to push in on a larger army with fewer losses.

In marketing and business the pincer movement can be envisioned as a company working to dominate a market and whittling away at the competition by doing multiple things (at least two) really well and building towards a future state of their company. Think about the objective of this strategy as the future state of a company that could dominate a market, then divide that company into two or more groups of services, products, or brands. Place each group in a relative position on the opposite site of the objective market and build up their strengths in those markets while siphoning off resources from the current and future competition, then when the timing is right bring the two together.

For example consider that you owned a bookstore called something like City Books in the late 1980’s and noticed the rise in popularity of coffee shops and that many people read books while drinking coffee in those shops. You might envision a future state where bookstores and coffee shops are in the same location and desire to work towards building it. Also consider that the local coffee shops have customers buying books from you to take to those places or that you even have a referral arrangement with them where you store refers coffee drinkers to those shops and they in-turn recommend buying books at your store. It would have been difficult to add coffee to your bookstore and win over customers with a name like City Books Coffee and you would have ran the risk of losing your sales from your partnership with other local coffee shops. However, if you took over a neighboring or nearby store front and started a new coffee shop called City Coffee and sought to win over customers with better service or unique coffee products compared to other offerings, then you would have been able to maintain your current sales flow, build out a new segment of business for your brand, and build towards a future state where your bookstore and coffee shop shared a location.

By structuring your business in this way you would have taken other bookstores and coffee shops by surprise and would have been able to build what would become commonplace over the coming decade allowing your business to grow in profits.

Pros vs. Cons
Pros: Allows a business to build a competitive advantage over a long-period of time reaching a future market state without giving up valuable business relationships in the short-term.

Cons: Future states where business segments combine to reduce overall costs and increase profits often look better on paper than they do in the real world. There’s also a chance that the competition will notice your efforts early on and be able to out maneuver you or worse yet if they are supplying a revenue stream to you cut that stream off.