Rethinking Competition
Competition is a natural thing and regardless of how many times we say that we're not competing, we are actually. It's a race thing
The Origins of Competition
Since the beginning of time, humans have been known for being competitive. This natural instinct was developed due to the environment they were living in. survival required being the best in hunting, fishing or building shelters. And the more competitive the people become, the more they developed the humanity around them.
Although some of these competitions didn't yield anything but wars like what happened in the WWII, some competitions led to the prosperity. And with the rise of the industrial era, this competitive spirit with its both effects moved to the companies making them fight nick and tuck for the sake of gaining the loyalty and attention of the targeted users.
But think about it?
How would the world look like without that top on class student that you always wanted to beat? Or that football team that won a match over a match on your favorite team's cost. Or the market without that annoying brand knowing everything about the industry tricks and making your life a hell.
Take Care of Your Competitor
It would be boring to exist in the market alone. Competition makes life more entertaining and provides the needed adrenaline rush. And above all, it's not a healthy practice for your business to stand alone for many reasons:
1. Competition makes you care
If you're a market monopoly, your clients will have no option but heading to you for acquiring this particular service or product. Over the course of time, you may start taking your customers for granted and ignoring any improvements in your service like what happened with the famous Pokemon GO.
After the game massive success, the developers working on it couldn't keep up with servicing back and the bug solving issues. So instead of having more features in the next version, there were only extra bugs. This was when the quality started declining due to the absence of competition.
Unless you have an inner motive towards striving for customers' best, competition is the guarantee for your business to keep serving the best possible quality. If you're the only player in the field you won't feel an urging need to improve.
Competition forces you understand your market; because if you're targeting a certain group you will not want to lose it. Also, competitors may be doing your business a favor by also putting away the unsuitable customers.
2. Competition introduces you to yourself
It's looking in the mirror. It reveals your strengths, weaknesses, and highlights possible ways of improvement. And while you experiment with your product or service trying to surpass your opponent, you will discover your priorities and brand points of difference. This will push you out of your comfort zone into new green territories.
Competition examines your ethics and identifies to what extent you will compromise your values for the sake of winning the game. It Makes complacency shake off. And as you know yourself better and work on your weaknesses, you will be on your way of creating brand evangelists who would defend your business when triggered by competition.
3. Competition evokes innovation
The competition will make you think of other ways to add value. And forces you to go the extra mile of thinking to innovate solutions. Competition forces you to stay fresh and always upgrade your knowledge. Helps you work smarter. Makes you seek knowledge.
4. Competition adds to your humans
Improves your team capabilities. It teaches you to be proactive than reactive. It's a better motivation for getting ahead. Competition helps in raising the economy.
Don't blame players, blame the game
It gives you the opportunity to study different strategies that people follow in the market and you get to know what people prefer, whether it’s the low prices or that certain material. A competition will help you validate your ideas so make sure you're not standing alone in the market without customers. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.They already scaled by following a certain strategy, you can always learn it and do it later if its suitable for your business. Stay competitive but combine forces whenever possible.
Strategic alliance
Over the past few years, the concept of competition has evolved to a more mature form of collaborative competition. Where you and the other brand unit the forces for the sake of having
This form of cooperation can be a shortcut for small businesses who can't afford all the time and money placed in figuring out how competitors work. Instead, making a strategic alliance can be the low cost route for gaining technology or market access.
The success of these partnerships shouldn’t be because of its longevity, it's more about how each partner capitalized on the information he has from this cooperation and experienced a shift in the competitive advantage.
Although these partnerships can weaken one partner in favor of the other, it's necessary for organizations, especially small ones, to seek such cooperation to acquire knowledge and experience. We are not saying that a strategic alliance should remove competition. But cooperation is the new form of competition.
Strategic alliances are not obligatory. You don't always have the power or the strategy that requires making partnerships. However, many big names in different industries are forming unions in their pursuit of getting more done for less.
For instance, more recently, as Microsoft and Nokia struggled to produce mobile devices that could snag market share from iOS and Android devices, the two businesses formed a merger that would combine Microsoft’s software strengths with Nokia’s hardware expertise.
One of the most profitable partnerships in the technology industry was between Microsoft and Intel, known as the Wintel Alliance. The partnership allowed each company to funnel resources into one core competency: Intel into hardware development and Microsoft into software creation.
Eventually this created a domino effect that later allowed Microsoft to join forces with IBM and create the revolutionary PC DOS operating system.
A strategic alliance can also be a made between non- competing companies
Apple & IBM
To quote IBM, its new partnership with Apple “brings together the analytics and enterprise-scale computing of IBM with the elegant user experience of iPhone and iPad to deliver a new level of value for businesses”.
The alliance will draw on Apple’s consumer experience, hardware and software integration and help invigorate IBM’s image, which has sagged a bit in recent years. The partnership will leverage IBM’s big data analytics and more than 100,000 industry sales consultants and software developers, to help Apple penetrate the global corporate enterprise market.
To quote Apple “the partnership will add a new class of apps to connect users to big data & analytics, on their iOS devices”
Spotify & Uber
Another genius partnership. The ability to enter a hired car welcomed by your favorite playlist provides added value, meaningful competitive advantage and exclusivity for Uber cars. For Spotify, it provides an incentive for users to upgrade to the premium level and a unique point of difference that Pandora, iTunes or YouTube don’t have.
Google & Luxottica
The Google / Luxottica partnership is a brilliant one. Google glasses speak to technology but not fashion and Luxottica's brands speak to fashion and not tech.
The partnership will result in attractive Google glasses that could be purchased based on looks alone, and the cutting edge technology can give Luxottica brands a reason for purchase that justifies a premium price.
Luxottica's glasses are increasingly being undercut on price by retailers such as Costco, TJ Maxx and Warby Parker.
But not every competition is a good one
As some nations fight for lands thinking that wars are the inlet to a better future where they can prevail, some businesses fight for market shares and sometimes customers in the same fatal way.
From our perspective, these types of competitions drag communities back and hinders the evolution of the humankind. Bringing corruption to the surface and pursuing illegal acts for the sake of winning like fraud, manipulation, using low quality materials or even simple things like spamming.
And taking every competition as a must win battel will leave you drained of both resources and power to pursuit for the upcoming years. It doesn't really matter to be the number one in the market if you can't sustain yourself there.
You should keep your business of burning out and lower the expectations you put on your shoulders out of fear.
In Baianat, we believe in enjoying the journey more than being the best, top, number one or any other adjective that makes us feel unsatisfied about being ourselves.
We are not considering competition as a minor thing, however we don't build our entire operations around it and we don't think comparing ourselves to the market will yield in any advancement to the community.