Lesson 3: Redimension your competitive advantage (contd.)
Redefining our business and reordering our priorities leads to a radical alternative view of competition. For most businesses, they compete with other businesses for the resources of their customers. Competing with other businesses for the pool of profit held by a group of potential buyers. Our aim is to get something the customer has and we want to get it all for ourselves or at least get more of it than our competitor. This concept of competition is self-centered and self-referential and is inevitable when you have a profit-centered business model.
If you truly have the customer’s best interests at heart and there is another business that is providing greater benefit to the customer than you in an overlapping area, what should your reaction be? Any reaction other than joy would suggest that your customer’s best interest is not your core motivation. Yes, you might be disappointed that your business was not the one to provide the better product or service, but you should be happy for the customer. In this case, the other business is not your competition. Since you are in business to benefit and serve another person and they are doing this better than you, it would only be sensible to seek to learn from them – this should be the first impulse. Not learning how to beat them, but understanding how the thinking and behavior of that business led to such results. Whatever you do next, these lessons will pay off greatly.
There is then a wide range of things you can do based on this unique approach and the lessons learned. You could decide to co-operate with them – for example, if they have a much better product than yours and the cost of re-engineering your processes is too high then you can decide to work with them in some way. Another option is to improve on what they are offering based on what you learned from them. This improvement is not out of spite but using the lessons to better serve the customer. You could even take the principles (or even the same product concept) learned from them and apply it to another area or to another set of customers.
On the other hand, when you encounter another business that is serving your target poorly or doing them a disservice – maybe depriving them of something you consider essential or being deliberately deceptive in their communications – then you have a basis for real competition. Remember your rationale – you are not fighting because you want more of the pie for yourself, you are fighting because you want what is best for your target regardless of who is involved in achieving this. The way you go about it will be driven by your underlying reasoning. Sometimes, the issue is honest communication with and education of the target – when the target is not aware that they are being under-served or harmed in some way. The growing complexity of the modern world has meant that reliable information is scarcer than it should be.
Imagine the scenario where there are two other businesses – business A which your competitor (who is under-serving the target) and business B who is doing a terrific job (better than you). Suddenly your response options expand. The details of every possible scenario and all the potential responses and maneuvers are beyond the scope of this article but you can already see that the list of possibilities is endless. What you formerly saw as black and white competition has now become this multi-coloured set of interactions that advances your agenda of bringing true delight to the customer.
Questions
· How are you currently viewing your competition?
· How should it change?
· What creative options can you now see by re-dimensioning your competition
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Dr. Osinowo is a thinker and teacher: coaching high-potential leaders, advising organizations and originating breakthrough ideas. He is the founder of CANTAB Associates and the pioneer of SAPIENCE which is both a philosophy and methodology of thinking. He previously worked in the London office of the leading global strategy consulting firm Bain & Company. He studied Medicine at the University of Cambridge where he was a Cambridge Commonwealth Scholar. He can be reached for your questions and comments.
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Toluwanimi Osinowo
