We are all used to ensuring that our strategy is secured around monitoring our competitors and developing our business in a way that will compete with others. However, it may well be that long term success is not delivered by having this type of focus. Here are a few reasons why competitors may not be the best benchmark to follow.
Too short sited
It is clear that putting the customer, as opposed to the product, at the centre of developing business is essential to any effective marketing campaign. But when we consider what will excite the customer and the type of value they attribute to our brands many of us may well be suffering from marketing myopia. To illustrate this point I would like to point to the success of Cirque du Soleil, they have effectively managed to make a dying industry (the circus) into a worldwide phenomenon. They did this by fusing 2 industries together, the theatre and the best of the circus. By removing elements that had lost their value (such as animal acts) the brand focused on an entirely new concept that was new and innovative, but most of all contained value for the customer by meeting an unmet desire of interpretive theatre merged with the best of circus quality. See the excellent writing by Ocean Blue Strategy for more on this topic.
Lack of emotional connection
Over time a brand loses focus with its customer. It gets so enticed into the measurement of its opponents that eventually the true desires of the future consumer are lost. The monitoring of cultural & social dynamics in the world are also often overlooked and many businesses focus on either cost savings or on answering immediate customer requests with a solution based model that initially appears customer centric. But what does this actually mean in challenging a change in consumer feeling in order to create new markets? This is where innovation needs to meet consumer value in order to create a real experience for the customer, this is more likely to endure in the long term and most importantly surpass competitors. An example of this is in Facebook where the inherent need to be social, coupled with an ever expanding global migration of people, made way for an entirely new format of innovation online.
Creating more risk in the long term
While initially the opportunity to measure, based on the same premise as competitors seems to be attractive, in the long run it can actually present the most risk. Consider how few businesses last that don't alter their value led creativity. And look at the leaders who are they following? This shows that out of the box thinking, merged with developing unmet needs by means of value to the customer, is by far the best strategy to take, even if there is currently no benchmark or historical data to prove this is the case.
So what do you think of your competitors now? The question is do you want to follow or to lead?
