I am not a football expert. So, let me get this straight. I understand that the team that wins is the one that scores more goals than the other side. Is that right? Your job as a highly-paid footballer, therefore, is just to keep on scoring goals. The more the merrier. After all, the more you score, the more likely you are to be the winning team. Gosh, it is such a simple game, after all. Who knew?
Well, clearly not the England team on Wednesday night when they lost their World Cup Semi-Final to the foul-playing Argentina. The man paid a reported £5m a year to manage the England team seemed to think that, having scored just one goal, it was time to stop trying to score and just to defend. His strategy appeared to be to hope that Argentina would not score. As the consultancy firm McKinsey points out, “Hope is not a strategy”.
It might not be a good idea for you to follow Thomas Tuchel’s management style. Yet, like me, I am sure you can come up with several examples of business leaders who have done exactly that. They have thought they were in a strong position, so spent time defending that, only to be ultimately beaten by the competition. BlackBerry defended the keyboard, Kodak defended photographic film and Blockbuster defended the video store. Their competitors were not trying to play the same game more effectively. They were changing the game.
These companies were once full of attacking players. They stormed their way onto the market and led a march against their competition. Then, for whatever reason, they stopped and appeared to hope that a defensive position against future attack against them would be all they needed to do.
Being defensive in business came up in conversation this week in a meeting with university colleagues. Once again, the Business School where I teach was ranked as the Number One in the UK for “Academic Support” and “Freedom of Expression” in the 2026 National Student Survey. This is conducted each year by the Higher Education regulator, the Office for Students.
However, at the meeting where we discussed this I suggested we should not focus on defending our position. Rather we should come out fighting to ensure we improve upon our current status. In other words, if this were a football match I’d be saying, “regardless of how well we have done, I want more goals”. It’s the only real way in which we can be sure of future success. Sitting back, being defensive, merely opens up the possibility for competing universities to leapfrog us in the rankings.
In business, though, the concept of “defensive marketing” is widespread. Consider Telstra, the dominant Australian telecommunications provider. This is frequently cited as an example of “defensive marketing”. However, when deregulation threatened to bring new competitors into its market, it did not simply erect barriers around its existing customers. It changed its prices and made itself more attractive. Marketing textbooks may describe that as market defence. In practice, it was an attack.
The problem with much marketing literature is that what it describes as “defensive marketing” is nothing of the sort. It is where companies go on the offensive. The result, inevitably, is that it defends their position. In much the same way that attacking footballers who score goals defend their winning position.
However, as the Argentinian players discovered on Wednesday, when the mental framework of their opposition is “defend”, they give up attacking. Once an organisation adopts a defensive frame of mind, following that textbook advice, its attention changes. Instead of asking how it can win more customers, it asks how it can avoid losing the customers it already has. The result, just like Blockbuster or Kodak, is that it is so very easy for opponents to find a way through and win.
If I had my way, I’d ban the phrase “defensive marketing” because it puts businesses in the wrong frame of mind. In psychology, this is called a prevention focus: the organisation becomes preoccupied with avoiding loss rather than achieving gain. That’s precisely what happened with the England football team.
The only way to defend your market position is to go out and win more customers. That is attacking marketing, not defensive marketing. Can someone tell the England team?
