How To Succeed in a Competitive Market

Competition exists when two or more businesses offer SIMILAR products or services, aimed at satisfying the SAME need as expressed by members of the SAME market segment, within the SAME market place.

Creating a Competitive Advantage is a matter of improving one’s operational EFFECTIVENESS, which can be accomplished by either:

• Operating a transformation process similar to one’s rivals but with greater effectiveness—process quality; greater predictability of outcomes.
• Operating a transformation process similar to one’s rivals but with a different approach—creative, innovative.
• Operating a transformation process unlike that of one’s rivals–disruptive.

Remember, the transformation process is all about adding value. The amount of value that your buyers/users recognize and experience as utility, determines how much profit margin they allow you to charge—before they start considering competitive offers.

Consequently, in the absence of any DISCERNABLE competitive advantage, buyers will base their purchasing decision on price.

Success depends on DEVELOPING your transformation process; increasing your business system’s capability and capacity. After all, business system of higher quality cannot fail to perform on a qualitatively higher level, which produces products and service of higher quality, which is more efficient, and thus more sustainable and profitable.

Business GROWTH—increasing a business in size and form, most notably the bottom line results—can be accomplished either as a result of business DEVELOPMENT, or at the expense of business DEVELOPMENT. You either increase demand through popularity (attaining the obvious choice supplier status) or by eliminating your competition.

The Necessity of Choosing

Remember Robert Frost’s famous poem “The Road Not Taken”? He describes how “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood”, and how they looked the same to him. Yet, the poem ends by sharing:

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

The road less traveled by is the one we justify taking by claiming it as the product of our own choices, as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance.

If you had to choose again, what would be your own choice, as opposed to mainstream dogma; DEVELOP the transformation process, or GROW bottom line results?

Which one will, “ages and ages hence” make all the difference to YOU?
What would YOU like your legacy to be?
What would make YOU proud?