I am a very strong believer in knowing your competitor's product almost as well as you know your own. The only way to do this is to visit their business and look at it from the point of view of a customer. This is an accepted practice. I have had clients who run large supermarkets and once a week they visit the other main supermarkets to see what their competitors are up to. It is all done very openly, as the managers know each other.
The information that this type of activity can produce is very valuable, especially if you can conduct this kind of survey with an open, objective mind. The following list identifies some of the questions that you need to be able to answer after the survey:
- Is their business easier to find than yours?
- Is it easier to park?
- Is the business more inviting and visually appealing than yours?
- Is the lay-out more effective?
- How does their range of products compare to yours?
- How do your prices compare?
- Is their business clean?
- How are their staff presented?
- Are the staff friendly and polite?
- Were there long delays in being served?
Some of the above topics may not be relevant to your particular business, but I am sure that there are other questions that could be included.
I always recommend to my clients that they spend time getting to know their competitors before they start to review their own business. We recently developed a marketing strategy for the local operations of a large telecommunications company. The first part of the project entailed visiting all of the other mobile phone shops in the area. There were about 30 in total. We asked questions and reviewed all aspects of these businesses and identified several major weaknesses of each shop. By addressing these weaknesses, which had to do mainly bombard customers with hundreds of glossy brochures without actually selling them anything, we could tailor-make a winning strategy for our client that helped it to become very successful.
This leads on to the point about setting up a business in a highly competitive field. The only way that this can really be done successfully is by having a very clear understanding of what your competitors are doing. Put simply, it's often a matter of looking at how the other businesses operate and identifying ways to do it better. This principle has made a lot of people a lot of money over the years.
Reviewing what your competitor's business offers will usually highlight that it isn't about price as much as it's about service.