DW's Blog

Activities: The Hidden Metrics That Define Your Market Position

by DW Green — April 23, 2025

“Activities are the building blocks of your business model and the foundation of
your competitive advantage. They answer the question:
“What do we actually do?”

In marketing, we often focus on traditional metrics—brand awareness, customer acquisition costs, conversion rates—but there’s a more fundamental metric that deserves our attention: activities.

Beyond the Status Quo:

Most businesses operate within established industry norms. They analyze competitors, observe standard practices, and make incremental improvements to existing models. This approach inevitably leads to imitation rather than innovation.

True differentiation comes not from doing things marginally better, but from doing fundamentally different things— or doing the same things in dramatically different ways.

Activities as Competitive Advantage:

Activities are the building blocks of your business model and the foundation of your competitive advantage. They answer the question: “What do we actually do?”

Consider Southwest Airlines. Their market position as a low-cost carrier isn’t just a tagline—it’s built on specific activities:

Using secondary airports
Employing a single aircraft type
Offering no-frills service
Implementing rapid turnarounds
Maintaining direct point-to-point routes

Each activity supports their position, and more importantly, these activities work together as a system. A competitor would need to replicate the entire system to truly challenge their position.

Measuring Activities for Market Positioning:

How do we turn activities into metrics? Start by answering these questions:

Activity Selection: What specific activities do we perform that differ from our competitors?
Activity Elimination: What industry-standard activities have we deliberately chosen not to do?
Activity Innovation: What new activities have we introduced that others haven’t?
Activity Integration: How do our activities reinforce each other?
Activity Measurement: How can we quantify the effectiveness of each distinctive activity?

Layering Activities for Sustainable Advantage:

The real power comes from layering activities—creating a system where multiple distinctive activities support and amplify each other. This layering makes your market position:

Harder to copy: Competitors might replicate one activity, but struggle to implement the entire system.
More distinctive: Each layer adds depth to your market position.
More sustainable: As activities become interlinked, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

From Metrics to Action:

To implement an activity-based approach:

Map your current activities against competitors to identify similarities and differences.
Identify opportunities for distinctive activities that would support your desired position.
Develop metrics to measure the effectiveness of each activity.
Create linkages between activities to build a reinforcing system.
Regularly review which activities continue to provide differentiation as the market evolves.

Conclusion:

In a world obsessed with following best practices, the greatest competitive advantage often comes from deliberately breaking with convention. By focusing on distinctive activities rather than incremental improvements, you create a market position that is both meaningful and defensible.

The next time you evaluate your marketing strategy, look beyond traditional metrics and ask: “Are our activities truly different, and do they work together to create a position that only we can own?”

Your activities tell your real story—make sure they’re telling the one you want customers to hear.