Who are your competitors?
Unfortunately many brands still take a very isolated view when defining this. They cluster the market, define niches for their respective products and then proceed to determine the competitors. The market ends up being one big file-cabinet, with each drawer including a brand product, its ‘strategic’ competitors and the target group. This method is as out-dated as the file-cabinet! Brands have to be clear about what exactly they are competing for. Are they competing for customers? Hopefully they are, but customers and the environment, in which they live, have changed a lot in recent years.
The average customer, i.e. human being, is awake 1.020 minutes per day. During those 61.200 seconds he/she spends time with his/her family and friends, eats, works, is stuck in traffic, listens to the radio, watches TV, surfs in the Internet and the list goes on. This means that brands are initially competing for their potential customers time and so is everybody else – family, friends, colleagues, bosses, news, entertainment, thousands of advertising messages – and not just the ‘strategic’ competitors. Brands have to get the attention from someone who is increasingly suffering from information overload. They are well advised to respect the fact that their potential customers time is extremely valuable. Not only that, but more and more consumers don’t think in the old classification systems anymore: The competitors of a premium subcompact are not necessarily other premium subcompacts, it could very well be an iMac. Not only that, consumers will benchmark across product categories. Last but not least, who knows what new alternatives will hit the market tomorrow. Difficult times ahead for brands, as competitors are everywhere but in the file-cabinet. So why not get rid of it and the dusty thinking the comes along with it?