Reading: The Competition

The Competition

Competition is a good thing. It forces you to perform at a high level, and sometimes it can even legitimize your product or technology, like when IBM entered the PC market and made computers specifically for individual use. But you still want to beat the competition, and that becomes much easier when your product is significantly better along an important performance characteristic—and you can demonstrate it—or if you can solve a problem that the competition cannot. When you’re clearly the best, you make it harder for the naysayers not to choose you, and easier for supporters to promote your product. The challenge is to be clearly the best.

Who are your competitors?
For some types of products, this question is relatively easy to answer. Maybe you’re planning to do what someone else is already doing, but you’re going to do it better. In some cases, however, it can be harder to name the competition, or to figure out what, specifically, will differentiate your business.

The danger of complacency
Never believe that you have no competitors. Even if your product is one of a kind, you have competition. Your competition (not to be taken lightly) is the status quo, or the belief that your product is not especially necessary to people’s lives.

Keeping tabs on the competition: Lessons from a retail giant
Tom Stemberg, founder of office supply superstore Staples, made weekly, unannounced visits to his own stores, competitors’ stores, and others to get ideas of ways to improve what Staples does. Some of the lessons can be transferred to any new product or venture.

Says Stemberg: “I’ve never visited a store where I didn’t learn something.” When Stemberg visited a store, he looked for what the store was doing right. “You’ve got to see what they do better and learn from them. You must never take your competition for granted, because that can come back and hurt you.” In 1987, Office Depot was for sale. After visiting numerous stores, two Staples representatives declared that the business was on its way out and not worth buying. “Well,” Stemberg says, “Office Depot went on to become the biggest company in the industry, and we were still playing catch-up with them ten years later.”

Seeing through a customer’s eyes
When visiting a store, Stemberg says, “You try to see exactly what the customer sees. I carried a little pad and I wrote notes. Then I e-mailed them around to our management team.”

Know the competition, focus on the consumer
Stemberg maintains that you have to pay attention to the competition’s successes without forgetting that it’s the customer you’re aiming to please. “One of my great fears always was that our people would try to rationalize why we did things better, smarter, whatever, and stop the learning experience. One of the things you can do is lose sight of the customer. Lots of times I find companies overly focused on one another and ignoring what the customer wants, and therefore losing the market to some new entrant who truly focuses on the customer. Barnes & Noble spent all its time looking at Borders and Borders spent all its time looking at Barnes and Noble, when both of them should have paid attention to Amazon.com.”

Some ethical guidelines
When you’re sizing up the competition, act with integrity. It might be tempting to get a leg up by doing something unethical, but the truth will come out sooner or later. Fuld & Company offers the following Ten Commandments of Legal and Ethical Intelligence Gathering.

1. Thou shalt not lie when representing thyself.
2. Thou shalt observe thy company’s legal guidelines as set forth by the legal department.
3. Thou shalt not tape record a conversation.
4. Thou shalt not bribe.
5. Thou shalt not plant eavesdropping devices.
6. Thou shalt not deliberately mislead anyone into an interview.
7. Thou shalt neither obtain from nor give price information to thy competitor.
8. Thou shalt not swap misinformation.
9. Thou shalt not steal a trade secret (or steal employees away in hopes of learning a trade secret).
10. Thou shalt not knowingly press someone for information if it may jeopardize that person’s job or reputation.

Hopefully most of these “thou shalt nots” are far from your consideration. If you have any legal or ethical questions about your methods of gathering competitive intelligence, however, consult with your lawyer.