Don’t copy competitors. The chances are that our contemporaries at competitor businesses don’t know any more than we do.
I know a sales guy in the IT industry who has worked for half of the suppliers in his market sector. This is because he’s really good, by the way, and keeps getting offers he can’t refuse.
He long ago learned not to disparage the competition, in case he found himself working for them next month, but says anyway that concentrating more on the differences offered by the brand he’s currently selling is always a good discipline.
One of the things he finds amusing is that his latest employer always wants to find out about the competitor he’s just left. Not their trade secrets, but just what makes them tick. And they don’t really want to know the truth – that the competitor he’s just left really isn’t that great. The people there aren’t any smarter, and they don’t have any amazing secrets. He reckons that almost every business has at least some degree of imposter syndrome.
Over many years working in industrial media, I saw that pattern repeated. Companies would copy their competitors, based on little more than an unjustified fear that the opposition somehow knew more than they did. I met some amazingly talented and experienced people in industrial marketing, who would still get concerned when a far less knowledgeable competitor invested in some obviously wasteful promotional initiative, as if they might have overlooked the opportunity themselves.
The chances are that our contemporaries at competitor businesses don’t know any more than we do.