Are you my competition?

[Tom Hawes]

I was having lunch the other day when my companion (knowing that I had recently started my own company to do business and competitive strategy for high tech companies) asked me about my competition. That's a great question but I stumbled when answering him.

"I don't have any competition" was my first response. After only a moment's thought, that didn't sound accurate to me. There is almost always competition and it is important to know a lot about them (duh).

Maybe my competition is all of those people that are already doing competitive intelligence (that would be you folks). That's it. You are trying to get the same clients that I am approaching. If that is true, then the challenge for me is to demonstrate superior competence, faster responses or something else that is materially differentiating. That didn't feel exactly right to me because CI professionals seem to be quite dispersed and few in number.

Then it occurred to me that my competition is actually within the clients that I might serve. It is more likely to be the people that already have (partial) responsibility for CI or influence those that might consider starting a CI function. Their mindsets, biases, histories, etc., compete with the possibility that I could actually help them in a way that was important. Knowing that the competition is already in place and has certain advantages over me helps me to better craft a counter-strategy.

What do you think? Do you have a clear image of your competition? If so, how does that image lead you to effective marketing strategies for your services?

-- Tom
JTHawes Consulting Website - http://www.jthawes.com
Strategically Thinking Blog - http://tomhawes.wordpress.com

[August Jackson]

Tom,

Great post. I am a firm believer that your competition is any entity that delivers the same fundamental value that you do. For a CI consultant that includes other CI consultants (naturally), consultants from adjacent fields such as management consulting, the CI practitioners inside the firm and many others.

Not every competitor delivers value and extracts revenue the same way, and one of the traps of established players is to reject the notion that companies that "don't look like us" are not competitors. I made a post to my blog "Your Competitor Doesn't Always Look Like You." A thoughtful comment from none other than Mark Johnson on the blog post was that your competitor is any party that raises your customers' expectations for levels of service.