The competitor conundrum: Everyone has them–competitors–but a lot of businesses seem puzzled and/or puzzling about their attitude toward their respective competitors. Should you love ‘em, hate ‘em, worry about them constantly, copy them, or just ignore them and go about your business? Or what?

What is a competitor?

Mine is pretty broad definition: A competitor fulfills a comparable need for a buyer who you might sell to also. A competitor doesn’t necessarily have to be an organization that offers exactly the same widget or service.

A couple weeks ago, one CEO told me after I asked him who his competitors are, "We don’t have any." I repeated the question, and he said "Well, there’s a guy who left the company who stole some of our ideas; of course he’s not doing well, and I don’t really consider him a competitor." At another end of the spectrum, another senior executive said last week, "The only good competitor is a dead one," –and he was being serious." I listened and reflected on my 23 years in the healthcare and IT worlds. I’ve heard the whole gamut of attitudes toward competitors, and in my NoSpinMarketing Audits, I always ask about the competition. I decided to put competitor "attitudes" (that is, how top managers and their companies view their competitors) into a few buckets. No doubt that there are other types and hybrids–send me yours:

Four Attitudes about Competitors

1) The Deluded have convinced themselves that their products/services are so unique (or awesomely above the rest) that they truly believe that they do not have any competitors. They often forget that their biggest competitor is the status quo (especially in the healthcare IT world). Aren’t prospects somehow getting by or operating without this new wiz-bang product or service right now? This attitude toward competitors is more prevalent in younger, smaller companies who also tend to forget that blazing the way into a new territory is a lot easier and more rewarding with competitors attempting to do likewise--than without them.

2) The Macho Crowd tends to be politically correct in public forums and acknowledges that they have (worthy) competitors. On the other hand, in private say offhandedly that their competitors really don’t measure up. How could they? And many believe that, "A good competitor is a dead one." This attitude is typically the by-product of immense insecurity and lack of relevant knowledge about the competition–and/or a way-oversized machismo. Wouldn’t want to look bad relative to the other guys, ever–would we? These folks know that the competition is out there and will admit as much, but they often ignore them (as well as belittling them). If they do take the competition semi-seriously, they usually don’t have a clue about how to really apply any competitor information that they might have.

3) The Paranoids spend more time worrying about competitors finding out about them than they do analyzing their own competition and taking action. In the Internet age, the Paranoids put virtually no information about their company, products, or people online in fear that doing so will be cataclysmic to their business. They forget that competitor intelligence alone is worthless–the trick is analyzing and acting on it. There is a also a subset of this group–the Schizoid/Paranoids (delusional and paranoid) who even though they deny they have any real competition, act paranoid as well and refuse to divulge any relevant information to the marketplace. Go figure.

4) The NoSpin Set chooses not to spin themselves, their colleagues, or the market about their respective competitors. They know and understand their competitors; they have a healthy respect for quality competitors and monitor what they are doing continually. They gather intelligence from their sales force, contacts in the industry, their own databases, other external databases, the Internet–and wherever else they can. While they believe that gathering current, accurate competitor information is critical, they know that their ability to analyze (not over-analyze) it and put it to work is most important. As appropriate, they change strategies and tactics and use that information to re-position their competition into boxes they don’t necessarily want to be. These businesses use their competitor intelligence to keep focused, take nothing for granted and keep moving forward.

In Summary

I like quality competitors because they keep you on your toes; give you new, good ideas and demonstrate bad ones to avoid; show you what markets to go after and not go after; help you blaze into new markets and territories; and give you a foil to help you continually define what you do and not do in the marketplace.

Everyone’s business attitudes toward competitors are unique, but the foolish options are to ignore or deny competitors and not use competitors to your advantage in developing and implementing your business and marketing plans.

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Tom Ranseen NoSpinMarketing 615.383.7157