TURKEY.....

It's kind of a Thanksgiving tradition.

Over pumpkin pie, someone from Beth's family will ask me if I'll be standing in line again tomorrow at 6 a.m. for the early bird sale at Walmart. Then everyone laughs.

And I always roll my eyes and say "Not this year".

But the next day I always find myself in the frigid Wisconsin cold waiting in line for "Wally World" to open. Usually I'm there to get a gift for someone that laughed at me the night before!

What kind of weird control does this Walmart sale have over me?

First, it's about a mile from my in-laws so I can roll out of bed, throw on my sweats and baseball cap and be there in 5 minutes.

Second, they usually have a great deal on some perfect electronic gizmo for someone I love -- even if they do laugh at me.

Walmart holds this way-too-early sale to preempt the competition. Retailers call it "Black Friday". The buzz this year is websites leaking stolen BF ads online. But Walmart decide to even pre-empt the competition at this, running their own BF sales ads online at http://www.walmart.com.

You may hate Walmart. You may love them. But you can't deny they're smart marketers.

And you can learn from them. Even if you're not in retail.

Preempting can mean being first to have a feature -- or being the first to promote it.

For instance, when Splenda launched, they first approached Royal Crown Cola about using their low-calorie sweeter. They knew RC was in the market for something to differentiate their cola. RC invested heavily invested in promoting the Splenda brand -- building sales for both. Meanwhile plenda used these ingredient branding relationships to go head-to-head with artificial sweeteners -- and sugar itself. In just a few years, Splenda has more marketshare than Sweet-n-Low and Nutrasweet -- combined, according to a recent issue of Business 2.0.

They did that not by being first artificial sweetener on the market, but by preempting the competition with selected brands.

Will I get up for at the crack of dawn again this Friday? I can't say--family may be reading this.

But I can tell you, I'll do a great job of preempting some blue-haired old lady to the last box of what I'm shopping for. (Just kidding!)


- Phil Sasso