Marketing Strategy & Competition

Some of today’s marketers have moved away from the challenge of finding the product-market fit and, instead, focus their efforts on their competition. It’s easy to get bogged down in a reactive stance doing so. Competitor-obsessed marketers sometimes fail to grasp that their competitors will also react to other players — including you.

Nothing is perfect in a fast-moving environment

It’s often tempting for businesses to chart the competition as a starting point. The reasoning is that they need to know who they are competing against, and how and where they need to do better. That might seem reasonable, but it’s not the most productive approach, as we’ll soon see. It’s also tempting to assume that competitors have already perfected the marketing strategy, but this very rarely the case. In fact, a marketing strategy is never perfect; it’s an evolutionary process and it’s being formed in an ever-changing environment.

In the same vein, businesses should know that simply copying a strategy will not work, and neither does simply reacting to the actions of your competitors. You can never quite reverse engineer another strategy, and even if you did, you’d be executing it under different circumstances and with a different set of means. You’re likely targeting slightly different demographic and your selling points are different. More importantly, your business will have a different set of resources and face different circumstances than your competition. 

Monitor, but don’t copy

Businesses who start with charting and copying the competition assume that said competition has mastered the product-market fit, and that there is a healthy margin to be made simply by duplicating these efforts. Not so. Many big businesses take a portfolio approach to their marketing strategy, i.e. some products might be sold at a slight or even negative margin, if it helps secure more new customers or generate a larger presence. While you can decipher and duplicate the exterior elements of a strategy, you don’t know the underlying business parameters.

Run your own race

All of this means a business will do far better developing a unique identity and tactics, rather than copying or surveying those of their competitors. Nobody knows your own niche or sub-sector better than you, and you only have insights into your own detailed costs, revenues and relationships. It is a good idea, however, to occasionally monitor what your competitors are doing; to get a feel for who is around you, what the employed tactics are, and understand any emerging trends, or tastes. But you should not be swayed by competitors’ actions unless they are of such profound impact they’re literally creating entirely new categories — or eating your lunch.