It’s easy to view your competition as a road-block to success. An obstacle standing between your company and the goals you’re striving to meet. But with careful analysis of their decision-making, you can predict their moves and turn competitors into assets for growth.
Getting inside your competitor’s head can be complicated, because not every business (or decision-maker) thinks the same way. Every organization has assets, resources, market positions, and skills that it must secure, exploit, and expand. Various endowments involve different approaches, even in the same general market setting. Therefore, even rivals with comparable endowments can follow different strategies if their owners, stakeholders, and decision-makers have different objectives.
So if you want to predict, rather than respond to, strategic moves, you need to evaluate the opponent at two levels: organizational and human. At the organizational level, you need to think like your competitor’s leader, searching for a better competitive match between its endowments and the changing market climate.
At the individual level, you have to think like the decision-makers of the company. This methodology takes you beyond the data-gathering activities of most strategic intelligence systems, towards a thought process that aims to turn competitive intelligence into business insight. While this strategy won’t eliminate surprises, it will help you better consider your competitors and their possible moves and remove some of the guesswork that prevents the implementation of plans in an increasingly interdependent business world.
What sets you apart?
So, are you isolated from that? Is the experience that you give your customers better than the experience your rivals can offer them?
Anecdotally, I’d say most business owners believe they stand out from their rivals, but only about 10% actually tried to support their views. This means not just doing marketing polls to say, “Look how awesome people think we are!” but really taking the time to discover their competitive advantage.
For example, in the defense industry, businesses frequently assume that they have significant differences. This is obvious when you look at their blogs, explanations of strengths, and marketing materials. Personally, I found it difficult to separate our physicists from theirs, our mathematicians from theirs, our mechanics from theirs, and so on. Yeah, yeah, businesses often have a niche where they stand head and shoulder above the others, but those niches generally can’t be leveraged enough to expand the business beyond a few million. However, in the high-tech world, such niches are often rendered obsolete by some new breakthrough, or duplication by a larger competitor. This normalizes competitive advantages across industries and promotes commoditization.
Here’s the problem: most of us really don’t know what our differentiators are because we haven’t researched our competitors. It’s hard to do well, but it’s crucial if you’re going to dominate and succeed.
A clear understanding of your competition helps you:
- Consider what your competitive advantages are
- Understand the complexities of the markets where you possess the advantage
- Focus your business activities, which should maximize your return on your campaign commitment and boost your revenue return
- Avoid becoming a commodity
- Clarify who the opponents really are
- Develop your marketing strategy to optimize your advantages
So what happens when there’s not enough to separate you from your competitors?
Okay, that’s easy: Manage partnerships, grow business, and deliver a better customer experience than anyone else.
This blog was written by Linda Rawson, who is the founder of DynaGrace Enterprises (dynagrace.com) and the inventor of WeatherEgg (weatheregg.com). She, along with her daughter, Jennifer Remund make up the mother-daughter duo of 2BizChicks (2Bizchicks.com). For further information, please connect with Linda on LinkedIn, or contact her at (800) 676-0058 ext 101.
Please reach out to us at GovCon-Biz should you have any questions.
