The Brand Factory's Branding Blog

Ignore the competition

Justin Cooper Added 10 months ago

When I started in marketing (about a hundred years ago) I worked in the UK Division of a US multinational household goods company. Our CEO would visit the marketing department every week to chat with the Brand Managers, Assistant Brand Managers, Marketing Consultants and even the lowly Marketing Assistants - of which I was one. News would spread like wildfire that the Top Dog was doing the rounds, and that it was a good idea to brush up on our knowledge before he arrived.

'So Justin,' he would say, in his mid-Atlantic accent, 'what's the market share by volume in East Anglia of Brand X this month?'

Market share was everything. Not share by value, but volume market share. An increase in volume share meant an increase in boxes shipped. If we managed to push the dial up by 0.3% in any given month, that was big news. But this obsession with market share meant an obsession with the competition. What were they up to? How could we out-do them? What were they thinking? And of course the most effective mechanism for 'out-doing' them was price. This would invariably trigger a price war, and short-term gains in share would soon be eroded when the main competitor dropped their price. Sure, we invested in consumer research to test new ideas, but we seemed to spend more time looking at the competitors' product than our own.

It's natural to want to compare ourselves against the competition - because it gives us a benchmark for measuring how successful we are. But there's a more successful approach: Ignore the competition, and focus on what we offer instead. What can we do to change the game? How can we improve on what we do and how we do it? And by focussing on our offer, we are by default, focussing on the customer and her needs. How can we make the customer say 'wow?' And by answering that question, we get away from price. Because price is always the lowest common denominator. The more we rely on it, the more we stare at our competitors, and the less we can wow our customers. But by focussing on our idea and how to make it better, the more we focus on how we could make things better for the customer.

Posted by Justin Cooper at 3:00 pm 0 Comments