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5 Ways You Can Use Competition to Your Benefit

Jamison Hutton1169 07-Dec-2018

Monopolies don't have the incentive of offering reasonable prices. They also don't innovate. Companies that are in the competitive world rely on those two things to stay relevant in the market. Therefore, the first advantage that competition offers is the insatiable desire to be the best.


Use Competition to Spur Innovation

Discover your competitors and their technologies. You will be surprised at how ambitious people are in the name of standing out. Use that knowledge to think beyond the simple price changes and packaging.


Companies are innovating in every aspect of their business. Every business function goes through extensive analysis to ensure it does not drag the company behind. Do better than your competition.


Analyze Competition

When you envy someone, you spend your time and resources learning about him or her. In business, you do the reverse; you spend your resources to steal their secrets. Companies are not perfect. They may have working strategies, but even the most successful formulas have assumptions and weak points.


When you analyze your competition, you give yourself an opportunity to improve on their successes. Since they have the advantage of the first mover, your only hope is to be better so that you will have that advantage over them tomorrow.


You also analyze your competitors with that hope that you can identify a blue ocean. You want to stand out in your marketing and product placement efforts, but that is easier said than done. If you study competition well, you will confidently identify a position that differentiates you from others.


Copy Successes or Simply Steal a Core Technology

Sometimes you can copy technology for the future. Millions of thriving businesses are copy pasted ideas. There is nothing original about them.


In exceptional cases, it is fundamentally important to copy. It is the case in the technology space. In the early markets wars for smartphones, Apple and Samsung were embroiled in suits and countersuits about patents. None of the companies wanted to be left behind.


Rather than go through the whole process of innovation, they just copied. Thanks to those shenanigans, and a couple of billions in fines, they are still toe-to-toe in the market.


There are repercussions for stealing. Size up the competition. Keep off the big guys because they will cripple you with litigation.


Listen To Their Customers

In some worse case scenarios, companies have camped at their competitor's stores or offices to interview current employees and customers. Although that is desperate, sinister even, you can do your fact-finding online in the comfort of your desk.


Disgruntled customers like to vent their anger by leaving unpleasant feedback. Listen to the input. Former employees also do the same. You don't need secret security cameras to do your spying.


A typical customer will even commend the company but add a comment in there. You can use those comments to improve on your service delivery. Customers want a great experience. An effective customer relationship management can keep a customer even when he or she knows there are better products out there.


Mirror their efforts

There are those efforts that you know have taken time to perfect. Well, you will never have time to play catch-up with competitors because they will crush you at the first attempt.


It is a common phenomenon in the digital marketing space. Since nobody really knows how search engine rankings work, people look for the most successful campaigns and mirror the link-building strategies. It is better than trying something that you are not sure whether it will work.Your competition can help you step up your game. Rather than fall far off the pace, you can copy.


Updated 10-Dec-2018

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