We live in a world where you and your competitors are largely selling products with similar benefits and features. The fragmentation of media makes it tougher to get your message to your consumers with a variety of methods available to promote your business.
Right now, you need to be thinking about how you can ensure that you are building a long term competitive advantage based on a unique, different but relevant and compelling offer to your consumers.
In order to do this, what few key things should you be doing to make you different enough to generate value and long term growth in today’s competitive global marketplace?
Competitive strategy is about being different. It means deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique service or product.
Just simply being good at what you do isn’t enough. You need to build hype, paint the perception and get results for the people that buy from you.
When everybody competes according to the same criteria, everybody starts to seem the same. Start figuring out how you can be different than your competition.
So many business owners or would be start-ups sit around trying to figure out how they can be better than the competition, whether it be a better product, better service, better features, and, in some cases, better price. But it can be much simpler to figure out how you can be different than the competition.
Being better than the competition is not like being different to the competition. Instead of trying to be better or exactly like, build a strategy around a simple way that your company is different from the pack. This is sometimes a situation where businesses say, “well, we are different we have a better product, or we offer better service.” Really, and do your competitors all suggest they offer crappy service?
Two questions you should ask yourself when starting to think about your business and how it is different are:
1. What are we doing that our competitors are not?
2. What are we doing like our competitors that we could change for good?