Your Competitors Shouldn’t Dictate Your Strategy

By Jaci Russo | CEO & Co-Founder, brandRUSSO

Every company watches its competitors. You should know who they are, what they’re saying, where they’re showing up, and how they’re positioning themselves. Pretending they don’t exist isn’t strategy. It’s denial with a nicer business card.

The problem starts when watching turns into reacting.

A competitor launches a podcast, so suddenly your company needs a podcast. They sponsor a conference, so someone wants to know why you aren’t sponsoring it too. They redesign their website, and by Monday morning there’s an email circulating with the subject line, “Have you seen this?” followed by a meeting invitation nobody asked for.

Before long, your marketing strategy has become an elaborate game of keeping up with the company next door. That’s not competitive intelligence. That’s letting someone else write your marketing plan.

You Don’t Know Why They’re Doing It

One of the most dangerous assumptions companies make is believing that because a competitor is doing something, it must be working.

You see the campaign. You don’t see the results.

Maybe that expensive trade show sponsorship generated hundreds of leads. Maybe it generated three conversations, two free tote bags, and a very tired sales team. Maybe the new campaign is part of a brilliant long-term strategy. Maybe the CEO saw another company doing it and asked marketing why they weren’t doing it too.

From the outside, you have no idea.

Yet companies routinely make strategic decisions based on what competitors appear to be doing successfully. That means you could be copying a tactic without understanding the audience, objective, budget, results, or reasoning behind it.

There’s something wonderfully ironic about copying your competitor’s strategy when there’s a decent chance they’re looking at yours and doing exactly the same thing.

This Is How Entire Industries Start Sounding Alike

Spend enough time looking at competitors and something predictable happens. Everyone starts borrowing from everyone else.

You notice they use a certain phrase, so you work something similar into your messaging. They emphasize a particular capability, so suddenly it gets more attention in your marketing too. They start producing short videos, so now everyone is standing in front of the same kind of camera explaining approximately the same things.

Eventually, five companies that are genuinely different somehow end up with websites that could swap logos without anyone noticing.

You’ve seen this before. “Trusted partner.” “Industry-leading solutions.” “Committed to excellence.” “Decades of experience.” All perfectly respectable phrases that have been used so many times they now communicate roughly the same amount of information as beige wallpaper.

When your strategy begins with what everyone else is doing, sameness is almost inevitable.

Your Customer Is More Important Than Your Competitor

Here’s the question that tends to get lost when companies become overly focused on the competition: What does your customer actually want?

Your competitor isn’t buying from you. Your customer is.

That sounds painfully obvious, but look at how many marketing conversations begin with “Competitor X is doing this” instead of “Our customers are telling us this.”

Those lead to very different strategies.

Competitor-focused companies tend to react. Customer-focused companies tend to identify opportunities. They pay attention to questions buyers keep asking, frustrations that aren’t being addressed, expectations that are changing, and gaps in the market nobody else has noticed yet.

Your competitors can tell you what already exists. Your customers can tell you where the opportunity is. That’s a much more useful place to build from.

Competitive Research Should Give You Context, Not Instructions

None of this means you should stop paying attention to your competitors. Competitive research is an important part of good brand strategy because you can’t differentiate yourself if you have no idea what everyone else is saying.

The distinction is what you do with that information.

If four competitors are all making the same promise, your takeaway shouldn’t automatically be, “We should say that too.” It might be the exact opposite. Their sameness could be showing you an opportunity to own a position nobody else has claimed.

Competitive research should help you understand the conversation happening in your market so you can decide how your brand contributes something different to it.

You’re looking for the open chair at the table, not trying to squeeze into the one everyone else is already sitting in.

Sometimes You Have to Be Comfortable Looking Different

This is where differentiation gets uncomfortable.

Most companies say they want to stand out until standing out requires doing something their competitors aren’t doing. Then everyone gets a little nervous.

There’s comfort in similarity because it feels validated. If everyone in your industry talks a certain way, uses the same channels, and follows the same playbook, doing the same thing feels safe. Nobody gets called into a meeting to explain why the company tried something different.

But safe has a downside. It makes you very easy to replace.

Strong brands understand that differentiation requires enough confidence to make choices based on their own audience, promise, strengths, and goals. Those choices may occasionally look strange compared with what everyone else is doing, and that can be a good sign.

If your strategy always looks exactly like your competitors’ strategies, I’d be much more concerned.

Focus Gives You Something Better to Follow

This is why Focus comes first in our Razor Branding™ process. Before deciding what your marketing should look like, you need clarity around who you’re trying to reach and what matters to them.

That focus gives you a filter for evaluating opportunities. Instead of asking whether a competitor is doing something, you can ask whether doing it makes sense for your audience and supports the position you’re trying to build.

Maybe your competitor needs to be at twelve trade shows a year because that’s where their buyers are. Maybe your audience would rather hear from your subject matter experts through LinkedIn and email. Maybe they need a podcast. Maybe you absolutely do not need another podcast in the world.

The tactic only makes sense in the context of the strategy.

Once you know what you’re trying to accomplish, competitors become useful information rather than marching orders.

The Takeaway 

You should absolutely know what your competitors are doing. Study their positioning, watch how the market responds, understand where they’re strong, and pay attention when something changes.

Just don’t confuse awareness with direction.

Your strategy should come from understanding your customers, your strengths, your goals, and the position your brand has the credibility to own. Competitive research can help you see where opportunities exist, but it shouldn’t decide which opportunities you pursue.

Otherwise, you can spend years successfully keeping up with your competitors only to discover that everyone has been running in the same direction.

And being slightly ahead of a pack of identical brands still leaves you in the pack.

Let’s change the conversation. 

Learn more about our Razor Branding™ process
https://brandrusso.com/razor-branding/

Or complete the market perception scorecard to get a clear read on how your market views you
https://brandrusso.com/mp-scorecard/

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brandRUSSO was established in 2001 by Jaci and Michael Russo, representing a global portfolio of B2B clients in the professional services and manufacturing industries. As a strategic branding agency, we believe in the promise behind the brand, and that by changing the conversation we can inspire and motivate consumer behavior.