Learn from your enemies

We need to spend time working out exactly what makes us different from our competitors. If you aren't clear on this, you can't expect customers to be clear.

In a world filled with ever increasing competition, businesses that are better able to connect and engage with customers are the those that win and one of the first steps in the process is snooping on your competitors.

Let's face it, your competitors directly or indirectly spy on you to learn how you do business.

Ethically speaking, your competitors should not be spying, some call it competitor modelling, but many groups of bad guys do it for their own survival.

What will a competitor gain by getting to know areas you are not best at, will they help you? They should be looking inside themselves for such things instead of being overwhelmed. However, the reality is that your competitors know things that you do not know. There are also things that you know that they don't.

I help firms close the gap between what they do and do not know relative to their competitors.

Outgun your competitors

In what ways can you outgun your competitors without spying? How can you uncover their strategy that ties all of their actions? One monitors competitors to take into consideration their strategy, positioning, branding, marketing, business strength and weaknesses before designing a plan and launching a marketing campaign to differentiate your offering and gain competitive advantage.

If you had known this, you would not have to spy.

If you have competitors spying on you to learn how you do your business, then you can gain competitive business advantages. You can learn about trends, product development directions and overall direction of your competitors.

Then you can determine if you want to follow course or go your own direction. Almost every strategic plan includes a component on competitive analysis. Even a basic S.W.O.T. has elements comparing yourself to competitors. There are also many tools that focus on measuring yourself against competitors, for instance it enables you to see what keywords your competitors are bidding on and can help you gain insight into missed opportunities.

Flip side

Some companies have a library of competitive information. But when you ask them what information they have about customers, they pull out a small binder, dust it off and present some basic demographic and psychographic information.

I've always been keenly focused on driving a business from a customer centric point of view.

If you truly study the insights, needs, wants of customers and focus your business on meeting the needs, then competitors become much less important. Make sure that focusing on competitors is not a distraction from what is more important - that is focusing on customers.

As a closing thought, I believe that it is essential for every business to stay aware and be informed regarding their competitors, but not to become obsessed by them.

Over the years I have seen businesses that have spent more time focused on their competitors' businesses than they have spent on their own.

To quote an old phrase, be aware but not alarmed. Competitors will come and go. Make certain that you know how your business compares, be clear about what your competitive advantage is and always aspire to be better at what you do.