on competition: knowing the other players
"As an entrepreneur, if you think that you don't have any competition, then it means one of two things:
- What you're working on is not worth working upon or
- You don't know how to use Google"
- Guy Kawasaki had once told this to Peter Panas and me during a global student business plan competition years ago, after we had just pitched the business plan for Securamed at the Stanford global e-challenge in Singapore. Competitiveness is the essence of any business and you need to know the competition to be competitive.
It must be obvious that you need to know who your present competitors are, but it is even more important to know the following three facets about your competitors:
- How will your competition react to your strategies?
- What is your strongest point and your competitors' weakest point?
- Who is likely to be your competitor in the short term vs the long term?
In this this post, I'll share my thoughts on #1 - proactively predicting the competitor's moves/reactions:
Just knowing the names and basic offerings of your competitors is never enough. Basic information about the obvious competitors is typically very easy to find. If it is a large company it is pretty straight forward to find the basics from the company's website. If the competitor is a public company, then it is even better. For large companies, which are private, you may find the basic information from the Dunn And Bradstreet reports. For large companies, which are publicly listed, most information is available from the EDGAR reports or the annual reports. Hoover's database (easily accessible from any decent library) is also very comprehensive. It starts getting trickier as the size of a competitor starts decreasing. Not only can a smaller company harder to spot, but their strategies/reactions are harder to predict. Most effective small companies are fairly agile and can adapt easily to changing market conditions.
more at the original post: http://www.kintya.com/blog/2008/11/on-competition-knowing-the-other-players.html
