For those who are not familiar with the term, first mover advantage occurs when one company gets ahead of itself and launches a new product or service before others. “At first it’s great: you get the hang of it! But be careful, because it’s not all laughter,” warns business school professor and popularizer Pablo Foncillas.
The reason is that being the first is not always a guarantee of success. And for example, a button: Facebook ended up eclipsing its predecessor, Friendster, despite the fact that it was founded two years before Mark Zuckerberg’s famous social network. Another example is Book Stacks Unlimited, an online bookstore that went on the market in 1991, three years before Jeff Bezos launched Amazon as a bookstore.
Several studies confirm that first-mover advantage does not always lead to commercial glory. This is indicated by research published in 2006 in the Journal of Marketing Research, which concludes that the first to enter a market fail much more than their followers. But “be careful, don’t confuse second with last,” adds the management expert.
