Competitive Advantage in the Sexual Market Place

Seeking a Competitive Advantage in the Sexual Market Place

A competitive advantage helps a business outperform rivals. It can come from lower costs, distinctive products, skills, resources, or access to customers. Some advantages also make entry harder for competitors.

For example, a product offering 90% of a rival’s performance at 50% of its price could appeal to cost-conscious customers. A product offering twice the performance at a 20% higher price could appeal to customers willing to pay for that improvement.

Graph 18 Accelerating vs decelerating competitive advantage

Michael Porter’s generic strategies distinguish cost leadership from differentiation. A cost leader operates at a lower cost than competitors, giving it room to compete on price. A differentiator offers something customers value enough to pay a premium for, such as quality, features, or brand reputation. Coca Cola, Kellogg's, and Jack Daniels illustrate competition through recognizable brands.

The Standard Oil example focuses on uniformity and quality control. A consistent product could stand apart from oil whose impurities made its performance unpredictable. The example uses that distinction to explain differentiation.

Scope concerns which customers a business serves. A company can address a broad market or concentrate on a segment. The Heineken example describes a premium offering aimed at upper-middle-class suburban customers when it entered the US market in the sixties.

The dating analogy treats shared interests as a way to find a narrower market. It describes "gamer girls" as women seeking partners among "gamers" and assumes that fewer women in the group means less competition and more demand. On that account, a "gamer girl" gains an advantage by choosing a niche. The conclusion depends on those assumptions about the group and its members’ preferences.

Differentiation, in this analogy, means developing traits that distinguish someone from other potential partners. The comparison is with a mass-market brand offering additional flavors to appeal to narrower tastes. It assumes that some traits attract broad interest while others appeal to a particular group.

The framework calls an accommodating, resource-providing approach beta-game and compares it with cost leadership. It describes an alpha approach as one in which a man expects a partner to meet his preferences. It further claims that women prefer to minimize what a relationship requires of them, seek alpha genetics for children, and may later look for a provider. These are assumptions about women and relationships; the business analogy supplies no evidence for them.

The alpha strategy is presented as differentiation: a man develops traits intended to make him scarce within a "sub-market" of potential partners. A pick-up tactic illustrates the intended shift in bargaining position: ignoring a woman’s appearance and asking, "So... other than your looks, what do you have going for yourself?" The aim is to make her justify her appeal to him. Whether the tactic has that effect depends on how she responds.

The Core Competencies of the Sexual Market Place

Prahalad and Hamel introduced the concept of core competence in the early 1990s (14). It is described here as "A harmonized combination of multiple resources and skills that distinguish a firm in the marketplace." (15) Such capabilities can support both lower costs and differentiation.

Core competencies meet the following criteria (14):

• A) Provide potential access to a wide variety of markets.
• B) Make a significant contribution to the customer benefits of the product.
• C) Are difficult for competitors to imitate.

The dating framework applies these criteria to game, a collection of social and dating tactics. For A, it cites field reports from different countries as evidence that the tactics work in different settings. For B, it relies on men’s reports of improved results after practicing them. Those reports leave open what caused the change: practice, different circumstances, particular tactics, or other factors.

Criterion C is harder to establish. The argument is that someone observing an interaction cannot easily copy the skills behind it, even if those skills can be learned. That would make the combination difficult to imitate. Calling game a core competence therefore depends on showing that the skills provide a benefit across settings and are difficult for others to reproduce.

A broad social circle is offered as a complementary advantage. It can create opportunities to meet people, and the framework proposes that acceptance within the group can serve as social proof. The argument assumes that those signals affect the preferences of potential partners.

The passage contrasts MGTOW, described as developing abilities according to personal interests, with PUA, described as developing them to raise sexual market value. It separates traits intended to affect competition among men—such as strength, dominance, and control of an interaction—from traits intended to appeal to women. It groups frame control, state control, and mindfulness under the label "alpha mindset".

It also uses the slang term chick crack for conversational tactics intended to attract attention or validation. The claim that these exploit women’s narcissism or desire for self-actualization is another assumption of the framework.

Artistic expression and athletic ability are examples of interests a person might develop to distinguish themselves. The framework ranks dominance-related traits as necessary and these other traits as supplementary. That ranking is a claim about attraction that would need evidence of its own; it does not follow from the definitions of competitive advantage or core competence.