All tagged Dealing with competition
Value is in the eye of the beholder. That seems like a straightforward statement, but it’s a hard one to truly grasp.
There are certainly tangible criteria that can be applied to the price of a particular product or service - its material inputs, the resources applied to convert those materials into some sort of finished product, and the related overhead needed to make all of that happen.
A couple of weeks ago, ahead of the Chelsea-Liverpool game in the English Premier League, a reporter asked the Chelsea Manager, Frank Lampard, how he felt about facing Liverpool considering where each team finished at the end of the prior season. (For those who don’t know, Liverpool won the league with 99 points, and Chelsea finished in fourth place, a whopping 33 points behind.)
In my last post, I discussed the idea of competition and specifically, that it’s existence shouldnt act as a deterrence to us entering into a specific market. In many ways, it can act as a validating factor that should, frankly, encourage us to play in that space.
But the more pertinent question, at least the one I’ve been turning over in my mind, is whether that’s even the right focus.
Our natural reflex, when we’re evaluating a market, is to think of competition as being a negative factor. If there is a plethora of companies already operating in a given space, fighting it out for share, our immediate assumption is that this market is “taken” or that adding another player into the mix is a dumb idea.
This might be the case, but then again, it might not.
In my last post, I talked about how there’s always room for value when deciding to enter a market and that the key is in defining that value in a way that matters to the customer, and is profitable for you.
In this post, I’ll discuss the idea of competition and how defining who you compete with, as well as how they go to market, can and should influence your decision to play within a specific space.
Now, our initial tendency as we evaluate a specific market will be to consider the most obvious competitor in that space. This is our direct competition, and they are always the ones with the biggest brand, revenues, mindshare.
