Knowing your Competitors

Knowing who your competitors are, and what they are offering, can help you to make your products, services and marketing stand out. It will enable you to set your prices competitively and help you to respond to rival marketing campaigns with your own initiatives.

You can use this knowledge to create marketing strategies that take advantage of your competitors' weaknesses, and improve your own business performance. This knowledge will help you to be realistic about how successful you can be.    

There are many ways in which you can get information about your competitors, and most of them are pretty straight forward. The most obvious one is to speak to them.   

Phone them to ask for a copy of their brochure or get one of your staff or a friend to drop by and pick up their marketing literature.  

You could ask for a price list or enquire what an off-the-shelf item might cost and if there's a discount for volume. This will give you an idea at which point a competitor will discount and at what volume.  

Phone and face-to-face contacts will also give you an idea of the style of the company, the quality of their literature and the initial impressions they make on customers.  It's also likely you'll meet competitors at social and business events. Talk to them. Be friendly – they're competitors not enemies. You'll get a better idea of them, and you might need each other one day, for example in collaborating to grow a new market for a new product.  

Listen to your own customers and suppliers  

Make the most of contacts with your customers. Don't just ask how well you're performing; ask which of your competitors they buy from and how you compare.

Use meetings with your suppliers to ask what their other customers are doing. They may not tell you everything you want to know, but it's a useful start.

Use your judgement with any information they volunteer. For instance, when customers say your prices are higher than the competition they may just be trying to negotiate a better deal.  Once you have collected all your information and analysed it, you can pinpoint the best areas to be incorporated into your operation, and improve or add missing areas that may give your company that important edge.

MH