All insights Strategy April 8, 2026 7 min read

Translated from the Vietnamese original

Part 1 of 2 in our series on the copycat wars. Read part 2: There is no pure originality

You spend months researching the market. You burn budget educating customers who have never heard of what you sell. You take early losses to protect quality, standards and people.

Then one day, a wave of brands appears doing exactly the same thing. Same concept, same positioning, even similar messaging. They spend nothing educating the market and lose no sleep finding the model. They simply jump in, right when the wave you created is at its peak.

The natural question is: who wins? The answer is less simple than many think.

The truth about first-mover advantage

Myspace came before Facebook. Yahoo came before Google. BlackBerry ruled smartphones before the iPhone. Blockbuster was a rental empire when no one had heard of Netflix. All were first movers, and all lost.

First-mover advantage is real, but it is an advantage at the start, not a lasting one. First movers claim mindshare early, build a brand before the competitive noise arrives, and gather real-world data before anyone else.

The side few people mention is that they carry the full cost of opening the road, with no refund. They build products while data is thin, which means many mistakes at high cost. The most dangerous trap is that they often stop innovating right when they think they have won. They don’t lose because they went first. They lose because they stop adapting.

Fast followers come in later, learn from the pioneer’s mistakes, optimize everything, and enter when the market is ripest: customers have been educated but aren’t yet loyal to anyone.

In Vietnam, fast followers come in more than one kind. Some are subtle: they watch, learn and improve. Others are blatant: they copy designs outright, use cheaper materials, cut prices, and spend nothing on the pioneer’s two most expensive tasks, product thinking and demand creation. They don’t fear intellectual property claims; they only need to sell before they are caught. In a market where buyers are still more sensitive to price than to value, this kind of follower sometimes wins in the short term.

Followers often win on efficiency, not because they are better, but because copying lets them allocate resources more shrewdly. So the question isn’t how to avoid being copied. It’s how to make sure the copycats can’t replace you.

Close to home

In less than two years, Ecochic did something few had thought of: it redefined the Vietnamese “đồ bộ”, the matching two-piece set. Not loungewear, not sleepwear, but an outfit confident enough to wear out, to the gym, to meet friends. It brought lifestyle, fashion and sport into one product, sold directly through livestreams and e-commerce, and built a feeling of “wear it and feel confident” rather than just selling fabric. The brand reported revenue of 600 to 700 billion dong in 2025. Right after, a wave of brands appeared with the same formula: matching sets, heavy livestreaming, similar positioning, competitive prices.

Phê La is seen as the brand that defined “strong-flavored milk tea” in Vietnam, educating a whole generation of customers about a very different tea experience. Soon after, many brands followed the trend, competing for share in the same segment, with the same customers, on the same wave.

Ecochic What competitors could copyThe livestream channel, the loungewear format, the positioning and price What they couldn’t copyThe speed of new launches, a community built from day one, the feeling that “Ecochic gets me”

Phê La What competitors could copyThe strong tea flavor, the tea-aroma concept What they couldn’t copyAn experience designed from the store space to the service, and the reason customers come back a tenth time

Nerman raised 1 million US dollars on Shark Tank with 1.3 million US dollars of revenue in a single quarter, and once led men’s cosmetics on e-commerce platforms. From the start, investors asked a blunt question: cosmetics formulas are simple and designs are easy to copy, so when competitors flood in, how will you defend your share? That question applies to any business built on an easily copied product.

Three stories, three industries, one structure: what gets copied is always the visible part. What keeps the winner ahead is the part below the surface.

Three things that decide who wins in the long run

No one can stop copycats. The right question is how to make the gap between you and those who follow keep widening. Three things decide that.

1. Lock-in: keeping customers inside your system of value

Apple doesn’t keep users with a single iPhone. It keeps them with an ecosystem: iCloud, AirPods, Apple Watch, MacBook. Each added product raises the switching cost. Leaving isn’t giving up a phone; it is giving up a whole life organized around it.

In Vietnam, some large conglomerates have built multi-sector ecosystems spanning property, cars, travel, healthcare and education. Every extra service a customer uses ties them in a little more. Points, perks and familiar experiences accumulate until leaving becomes expensive.

For an SME, lock-in doesn’t require a billion-dollar ecosystem. A nail salon keeps clients with their history, remembered color preferences, a familiar technician and a points program. An online fashion shop keeps customers with a private group, early member offers and the sense that “they know my size and style”. A training provider keeps learners with an alumni community, exclusive materials and a network only insiders can access. Different scale, same principle.

Lock-in isn’t about trapping customers. It is about creating a system of value where leaving costs more than staying. That is the real moat.

2. Value across the whole customer journey

Many people confuse the customer value proposition (CVP) with the unique selling point (USP). The USP is how your product differs. The CVP is the whole experience of choosing you, from first hearing your name, to buying, to coming back for the tenth time.

Copycats can copy a product, but not the whole journey. Two brands sell the same thing; if yours advises better, makes ordering smoother, supports customers more reliably after the sale and always makes them feel looked after, you still win even when the products look almost the same.

A strong CVP is one where customers can’t name a single reason they chose you, because so many small reasons add up to an experience no one else can replace.

3. Constantly renewing your value logic

This is the subtlest factor and the most often ignored. A great chef never lets regulars get used to the flavor, not by changing things for the sake of it, but because value is a direction, not a fixed point. Netflix moved from DVD rental to streaming, then to producing its own content. Each shift came not from pressure, but from seeing where customer needs were heading before customers noticed themselves.

Renewing your value logic is more than changing products. It happens on three levels:

1. Creating valueWhat need your products and services meet for customers, and how you meet it in a way others haven’t.
2. Delivering valueHow you position, communicate and choose channels. With the same product, whoever reaches the right people at the right moment with the right emotion wins.
3. Capturing valueHow you design the revenue model and manage the supply chain to optimize profit without raising prices. This is the level companies neglect longest, and the hardest to copy.

For larger companies, renewing the value logic goes further: expanding a product ecosystem, investing in adjacent industries and using capital markets as a competitive tool. At that level, copycats are barely a threat, because they lack the resources to play the same game.

Copycats study who you were yesterday.
You are building for tomorrow’s customers.
No one can close that gap.

So who wins?

Not the one who arrives first. Not the one who copies fastest. The winner is the business that holds all three: lock-in deep enough, value broad enough across the customer journey, and a value logic alive enough that no one, not even its own self from last year, can catch up. The day it drifts from any of the three, competitors won’t need to copy it anymore. They will replace it.

If you are cutting prices to match the copycats, that isn’t a business decision. It is a sign that these three things aren’t yet strong enough. If the only way to compete is on price, you are competing in the wrong place.

Getting there requires leaders and the organization to keep leveling up: not seasonally, not only in a crisis, but as a habit that never stops. In 2011, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop sent an internal memo comparing the company to a man standing on a burning oil platform. Nokia didn’t lose for lack of technology. It lost because it thought it was winning, just as the market moved to a different game. That lesson isn’t only for billion-dollar corporations.