5 rules for addressing your biggest competitors
While it doesn’t do you any favors to whine about corporations with deep pockets encroaching on your niche, staying silent can be just as unhelpful. Here are five ways to flip the script.
One of our clients introduced a new product to the marketplace 10 years ago. The product was wildly successful—and for most of the decade, they had the marketplace to themselves.
Then, suddenly, a couple of competitors released their own versions of the product. Unlike the client—a relatively small and independent manufacturer—the competitors have big marketing budgets designed to quickly capture a sizable share of the market.
The competition may not be an existential threat to a small manufacturer, but it’s a real one. They were upset. They did the hard work of introducing a new product and creating a market that hadn’t previously existed—and now their competitors were swooping in to profit from their hard work.
Reporters started asking the smaller company about their outsized competition. The smaller client didn’t want to project anger or anguish—neither is in their company’s DNA—but they felt disingenuous pretending that they were happy about it.
Here’s an approach that would have allowed them to be honest, but not petulant:
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