Stop competing, Start Innovating
Consider one of the following situations:
- You’re in fierce competition with another company and they’ve just totally one-upped you by coming out with a killer feature, or solving an industry problem that you both have been clamoring to solve
- You’re a small fish in a HUGE pond, just starting out or trying to grow, your competitor is a whale in your industry and you barely have any market share,
- You’re a big player in your market, but you’re not #1 or #2 though are fighting hard to be
- You’re building a product that’s similar, but different, to something that’s already out there and is successful
If you’re in any of these camps, do you ever find yourself asking what would “Acme Inc” do? Or saying, “Widget.com” just came out with a wiz-bang feature that solves world hunger, we can do it the same, but offer our own widget instead!
As soon as you’ve done this, you’ve FAILED. You’ve failed your customers, you’ve failed your employees, and you’ve failed yourself… You’ve FAILED!
Think about the following:
- Microsoft has been in the mobile game for a while. If you’ve ever used a windows mobile phone, before the iPhone came out, you may have thought they were great phones, for the most part. Today, the iPhone and Android are tearing it up; Ballmer decides to announce windows phone 7 (or whatever it’s called) years later, and, in my humble opinion, it’s terrible. They’re catching up, they’re fighting, and they’re doing a terrible job, and by the time it’s actually out, who will want one? FAIL
- Rewind to when Apple decided to allow people to make mac clones. Microsoft was highly successful at licensing their OS so clearly if Apple did it, it would work right? WRONG… Apple no longer allows other companies to mac clones… Need I say more? FAIL
- The iPhone is getting all the rave for a touch screen. RIM comes out with the Storm. Initial sales weren’t terrible, but definitely not a success. I personally know several people who got it when it came out and almost immediately returned it. I will say, however, that both my parents and my fiance’s parents have the storm 2, and it’s GARBAGE. It’s great for those who aren’t too tech savvy but want to stay with Verizon and want a cool touch phone, but it is definitely no iPhone or Android phone. See what I think RIM should do in order to compete. Dan Frommer of Business Insider agrees.
- Blockbuster was seeing empty stores, and huge slides in revenue thanks to Netflix. What did they do? Oh hey you can now rent movies online and have them delivered to your door. As of this writing, Netflix’s Stock is at $121.28/share with a $6.24 Billion market cap. Blockbuster? Near bankruptcy and on July 2, 2010 was delisted from the NYSE.
So how do you compete? I am of the opinion that the ONLY way to compete is to forget your competition. It doesn’t exist. Forget market share, forget the killer features your competitor is churning out while you’re stuck sitting on your thumb. STOP COMPETING. Get to know your customers, and when you think you know them, get to know them some more. Engage with them. Most of all, understand what their biggest problems are, then find the best way to solve them. DO NOT, and I repeat, DO NOT solve them the same way your competitors are.
Sure, there are examples out there where a company basically copied another company and won; though I’d venture to say it was because they just had more money behind them, or the original company faltered, or something along those lines. In the long run though, copying doesn’t work!
When the iPod came out, was there anything wrong with existing MP3 players on the market? Not really. Did they have problems that Apple solved (even if users didn’t know that they had problems)… Yes, and they solved it in THEIR OWN WAY. Was Yahoo a good search engine in the late 90’s? Yes, it was arguably the best! Did that stop Google from solving the users problems, in a completely different way? NO!
The common thread here is you need to think about how YOU can innovate the face off of your customers. What can YOU do that your competitor hasn’t thought of yet?
I’d love to hear your thoughts about this in the comments!
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