Aikido School of Marketing

The point

Aikido is a martial art: use the energy of the enemy against themselves. How to win: using the energy of the competition. In marketing, whatever the problem is, you turn it into a positive.

Jay Abraham · Two Day Rapid-Result "Instant Immersion" — Day 2 Cued to 6:04:13 1 min 47 sec loading…

Why it matters

You are watching a competitor outspend you, and you read their spending as the reason you cannot win. Every advertisement they run, every campaign that wakes a buyer who never thought about your category, lands on you as ground lost. So you push back: bigger campaign, louder claim, budget you do not have. That is the exact move an aikido master never makes.

Aikido does not meet force with force. The other side attacks, you blend with their motion, and redirect the energy they are already spending. In your market that energy is demand your competitor paid to create. Every dollar they spend warms the market you both serve, and when the buyer is finally ready, they are not hunting for whoever advertised most. They are hunting for the clearest, most trustworthy option in front of them. Their momentum multiplied by your positioning puts the client in your chair.

The whole art is leverage: a small, well-timed turn moves an opponent far larger than you, and costs you little. Hermes refused to answer its industry's volume with more volume, limited availability on purpose, and grew revenue past fifteen billion euros, up fifteen percent in a recent year.

Jay's second version turns inward, onto your own weakness. Take the negative, say it out loud before anyone else can, then show why it is the advantage. He apologises that a seminar is not live, then explains it is more intimate, re-watchable, and comes with the slides. Nothing swept under the table.

The mistake almost everyone makes

Most people hear 'use the competitor's energy' and start attacking that competitor by name in their own advertising. That is meeting force with force. You are now paying to keep their brand in the conversation, and the buyer reads you as the smaller, angrier option.

The test: Read your positioning aloud and strike every mention of a competitor. If nothing is left that a buyer could act on, you were arguing, not redirecting.

Where it shows up — 8 worked examples

Who	What happened
ARM	ARM chose not to manufacture chips at all, licensing its processor architecture to everyone who did and embedding itself beneath the whole industry.
Hermes	Hermes limited availability and treated the waiting list as brand architecture, growing revenue past fifteen billion euros, up fifteen percent in a recent year.
PayPal	PayPal paid its users to invite others and paid the invitees to join, buying the behavior that made its network more valuable.
Target	Target ran limited collaborations with Michael Graves, Missoni and Lilly Pulitzer; the Missoni launch sold out and crashed the website.
TransDigm	TransDigm acquires makers of proprietary, sole-source aerospace parts that are mission-critical and costly to replace, then compounds that aftermarket pricing power through more deals.
Warren Buffett / Charlie Munger	Buffett and Munger redeployed the float from the declining Blue Chip Stamps business to buy See's Candies for roughly twenty-five million dollars.
Zillow	Zillow gave every homeowner a reason to visit with its Zestimate, then monetized that attention through agents and mortgages before anyone transacted.
L'Oreal / American Express	L'Oreal built virtual try-on to answer buyer hesitation, while American Express screened billions of transactions in real time to catch fraud as it happened.

What it solves

The words a business owner uses for this before anybody has told them the name of it. If one of these is a sentence you have said out loud, this is your strategy.

Outspent by the category leader“They can put more money into advertising in a month than I make in a year, so I have stopped trying to be seen next to them.”You stop competing for attention with a budget you do not have, and start collecting the demand their budget already created, at the point where the buyer chooses.
Paying to educate a cold market“Half my sales conversation is explaining why anyone needs this at all, and I am paying for that education out of my own margin.”You let the competitor's advertising do the educating, and stand where an already-warmed buyer arrives looking for the clearest, most trustworthy option in the category.
Losing to a bigger name at the last step“The prospect likes me more, says so out loud, and then signs with the large company anyway because nobody gets fired for it.”You turn their size into the reason to choose you: the giant cannot know your client by name, cannot tailor, and cannot care the way you can.
A weakness you keep hiding“There is something about my offer I hope they do not ask about, and I change the subject every time it comes up.”You name the negative out loud before the buyer finds it, then show why it is the advantage, the way Jay reframes a recorded seminar as more intimate and re-watchable.
Attacking the competitor and getting nowhere“I keep pointing out everything wrong with the market leader and it just makes me sound bitter instead of winning me the deal.”You stop meeting force with force. Blending with the momentum they already created costs you very little and leaves you the clear option instead of the angry one.
Advisor watching a client push uphill“My client keeps asking me to build a bigger campaign to match a competitor they will never out-spend, and I do not know how to tell them no.”You hand your client a move that spends little: find the momentum already running in their market and turn it, rather than build a campaign to match it.

The challenge

Turn your loudest competitor's momentum in the next seven days

Name the competitor in your market spending the most to create demand, the one running the advertisements and the webinars. Write down, in their own words, what they are teaching your buyer to want. Then write a single page that gives that buyer the clearest, most trustworthy version of exactly that, under your name, delivered personally in a way a company their size cannot manage. Put that page wherever their warmed buyers already reach you: your search listing, your follow-up email, your first sales conversation. Send it to three prospects within seven days.

How you will know it is done Three prospects have the page within seven days, and your pod reads it and finds no sentence that names or argues with a competitor.

The AI layer · second pass

Once this is working, here is what to multiply

Improve the system first. Then multiply it. This panel is the second run at the strategy above, and it is deliberately useless until the first run is done.

Before you point anything at this You have named your own worst objection out loud to a prospect and watched them respond.

What it multiplies Tracking what every competitor is spending to teach the market, and showing where their momentum is already carrying buyers who have nowhere sharper to land.

The trap Meeting force with force at machine speed. Point a model at a larger competitor and it generates a thousand comparison pages attacking their strength, the exact move Aikido forbids, then polishes your honest admission of a weakness until no prospect believes it.