Hello, this is Wayne from Wayne Talks and today I am going to talk about something that is on the minds of everyone who creates a business. And that is one simple word. The word is competition.
Now, competition is something that can generate so much angst, particularly in new businesses, they look at the business world and think, this is just my business and my business world. And yet there are other people out there who have their own ideas. They're probably working in the same area that you're working in. And you have competition. The first thing you need to do is accept the fact that there is competition. Competition can be a good thing and competition can be a bad thing. A lot of it actually depends on how you deal with it. The first thing you need to realize is firstly, it exists. Secondly, it's actually a positive for your business. Why is it positive for your business? The simple answer is if there's competition out there, then there's clearly a market for whatever you're producing. Because if there wasn't a market, there wouldn't be someone out there before you who's trying to sell a similar product or at least sell into the same market that you're looking at. If there isn't anyone selling, then you could argue that at that point in time, there isn't going to be any competition, which initially could be a good thing because initially it means the market is open to you. However, I guarantee if you end up going into a market where there is zero competition, one of two things are going to happen. One, you're going to discover the reason there is no competition is because actually there's no market. Or two, you're going to discover very quickly that somebody else sees what you're doing and jumps in in the same market so you don't have competition. Now, that competition in that situation, a lot of people immediately jump up and down and go, they're copying me. It happens. It's one of those things. If you have a success within business, somebody else will come along and they will try to copy you. It might take six weeks. It might take six hours. It might take 20 years. In my particular business, it's taken probably 15 years before we started to see people trying to copy us. More recently, we've actually had designs that were almost direct copies of what we do. There's not a lot you can do about it. You can spend money trying to protect your designs. You can use copyrights. You can use registered designs. Unfortunately, all of that costs money. Given that we're all in a worldwide selling environment, you would have to protect it in all of the major locations throughout the world. That simply is not possible if you're a small business. If you've got the money to do that, you're probably not a small business. So the first thing is, accept the fact that you're going to get competition. The second thing I would say, if you've got competition, observe them. See how they operate. Look at their products. Be objective. Are these products better than yours? Now, initially, people are always going to say, no, my product's better. But you have to really be objective. You have to look at their product and go, have they created something that is potentially better from a user's perspective than what I have produced? If that's the case, then my answer is learn from it. It doesn't necessarily mean it's better. It just means the perception of that particular element of their product could be better. For a lot of people, they don't look at an individual element. They look at the whole. So there's almost a case of, yeah, they might have done something slightly better in that respect, but the whole thing, the whole package is not what a customer is looking for. Don't get too stressed. If you look at it and go, wow, they're better than me. One thing I do need to say at this point is something that's really, really simple. Never, ever, ever compete on price or certainly don't compete on price alone. If you look at their product and it's similar to yours or it's selling in a similar market, if their price is lower, do not consider dropping your price to go below theirs. It doesn't work. The only person who manages to win that battle is the one that has the largest wallet. And a lot of the time it's a never ending game. If they're substantially cheaper than you, then maybe you need to question whether your pricing structure is actually something that the market can withstand. If you're producing something for fifty dollars, fifty pounds, and they're producing exactly the same thing and it's ten dollars, then you really need to look at your pricing structure. Equally, you need to look at their pricing structure. Is it really equivalent? I mean, we use the allergy of a potter making a pot, custom made pot to a particular specification made of clay that's been dug up from the river. Amazon chipped around the world and is handmade compared with a cup from your local Target or as the yeah, there's no comparison. The functionality is it's a cup. The cup from as to target is going to be five dollars, five pounds. When you look at comparison, you need to be truly objective and go, is this in the same market? Yes, it's a cup. It's in the same market. But if you're making custom cups, you're a potter making it out of specialized clay. No, that is not in the same market. You will get customers turning around and going, I can get a cup for that price. Then it comes into you need to explain why your cup is completely different to the cup that they're comparing it to. You will find that there are people out there, companies out there who are in the same market issue. So there's another potter in the world making a custom pot out of specialized clay. And if they're five times your price, then either there's something really weird with your pricing or they could be something really weird with their pricing and they're just they want to price themselves at that level. So never compete on price unless it's at extreme levels. And then it's a case of you really have to look at why the pricing is so different. Is it a case of you moved into a market where there wasn't anyone else so they felt that they could charge anything? If you're in that situation, which I mentioned at the beginning, where you perceive there is no competition at the time, you do then get to choose what the pricing is. How much would people wish to pay for something? That's where you then get into the, well, I lost my friends and family and they'll give you answers which will be meaningless. Oh, I'll pay anything for that because you made it. Yeah, it doesn't work that way. You really need to look at the market and look at how much you think the market can withstand. That's enough about pricing. I am going to do a podcast about pricing at some point in time, but we're looking at competition. You might be confused by my first comment, which was competition is a good thing. Hold it. They're taking some of my markets away. People are going to buy the products from them instead of me. And the answer is, yep, to a certain extent that will occur. However, one thing it's doing is one, it's demonstrating there is a market there because somebody else has done their research and gone, there's a market for me to sell my product positive there. But equally, they're broadening the market in terms of they are bringing your product style to a larger audience. At the moment, you're not going to be spending vast amounts on advertising. But if you've got another company making similar product, they're going to be spending money on advertising or they're going to be using social media for advertising, probably. But the point is their market share and your market share will never dovetail exactly unless you're making exactly the same item and attempting to sell to exactly the same people. And if you are, I would suggest you look at your market and try and drift off to the side. Again, I'll look at marketing and markets in a future podcast. But the fundamental here is you've got two companies or a minimum of two companies running into a marketplace, which the marketplace in all is massive. It's the world. We're in that situation where we have competition. They're broadening the market. They are selling items to the public and you're selling items to the public. The first thing I said at the beginning was know the competition. Go and purchase their product. Be objective. Purchase the product. Look at how they're doing something and then analyze how it's used and then look to see if you've got anything in your range that would complement it. Now, when I say complement it, it's something along the lines of, OK, you've come across a customer who's purchased something from the competition. Is there any way that you can sell them something from your range that works with the product that they have purchased that complements the product they have purchased? If there is, you're now in a situation where you've just sold a product to a customer, which is the end of the day. That's what we're trying to do. The key here is you're complementing it. What you're not doing is basically turning around to the customer and saying, you bought rubbish, buy it from me instead, because what you're actually doing there is being very negative with the customer. And you're telling the customer effectively that they're an idiot because they've made a purchase that now you're saying is rubbish. Indirectly, you're saying it's not great. You should have bought something else. Never ever, ever tell a customer that they made a wrong decision. Always look at a customer as a person who's made a decision based on their own criteria. They've purchased that product from your competition, but for some reason, they're still looking at you. Now, is that because their competition doesn't offer exactly what they're looking for or is it a case of they're trying to justify their purchase? If they're trying to justify their purchase, then maybe they're unsure about their purchase. So again, is there something that you can do that can enhance their purchase? Can you sell them some accessories? Who knows? The point is if you don't understand the competition's products, how can you put yourself in a position where you can sell on the back of somebody else's purchase from the competition? You will also find as you get further into any industry, people will ask you questions about the products that other manufacturers make. Sometimes they're expecting you to come out with some conversation about, "Yeah, I don't really like those." Be professional. You might find that the competition are the most obnoxious bunch of currencies there are, and you might hate their product. But again, don't diss their product. The customer spent their money on that product. What you now need to do is to ensure the customer trusts you to purchase from you. So if the customer asks you, "I've bought this product. Do you do anything that works with this product?" Hopefully the answer is going to be, "Yes." Or maybe they're asking, "I bought this product and I'm having a problem with X, Y, and Z." Well, the answer then is, "Okay, well, I haven't come across that element before. However, maybe I can help with this." Be helpful. Even if it's a case of the customer is not going to buy from you today, a lot of customers will remember these conversations, and they then come along and they buy from you in six months. We talked about some tactics to deal with competition, but we haven't talked about some of the obvious ones, which are sell more than the competition. And the answer to that is, now we talked about what to do with the competition, but we've possibly missed the major one, which is the, "How do I induce a customer to buy from me and not buy from the competition?" And the answer to that is, you need to be better than the competition. And when I say better, not just better in the product, but better in everything, the service, the way you deal with the customers. If you can be better in the price, do not compete on price alone, but a lower price to the competition is always a positive from a customer's perspective. Then you need to look at the more basic concepts. One is, be different. Yes, there are two of you in this competition. In fact, there's possibly more than two of you. When I first entered the business that I was operating in, there were, I think, about four companies offering similar products. And when I say similar, some people consider them to be almost the same. They all had the basic functionality. The key for me was coming along and saying, "I'm going to do it, but I'm going to do it differently." It wasn't just the case of the product was different and our products were certainly different. It was the way we dealt with customers. It was the way we provided information after sales support. All of these things, which all added up to a different experience to buying from the competition. The competition had a greater reach than us. They were in more stores when we started. In fact, they were in stores when we started and we weren't in any stores. But there were still people coming to us saying, "We'll want to buy from you," because the perception was we had a better product. And we did. That's the nature of what we do as a business. We believe our product is better than other people's, but we can't sit there shouting about it all the time because it sounds very sanctimonious. People after a while just get bored of it and go, "He's just saying the same thing again and again and again." A bit like this podcast, really. I will move on. If you've got competition, look to see how you can be different. Also ask yourself why are the customers purchasing from your competition and not purchasing from you? Fundamentally, it might be just simply people don't know about you. That is something that's going to take time. We did really well within our business because people would talk about us. Now, word of mouth is great until it goes all wrong and then you have to deal with word of mouth with people criticizing and complaining about you. And yes, there will be a podcast about how to deal with that. But word of mouth is a great advertising medium. People talk. People buy from their friends. And that, for me, is actually one of the key elements. And again, I'll talk about this in another podcast. Buying from your friends. You tend to buy from people that you like and you tend to buy from people you trust. Unless you're going into the local supermarket and you're just buying something off the shelf and then you're not really buying anything from somebody. You're just walking in, picking a product up and walking out the door. And we actually found ourselves in a situation where we were dealing with stores with products on the shelf and that's how they would sell them. Our product never really worked as a straight pull it off the shelf because you had to have some understanding about how to use the product. We were that specialized. Now, you could put all your displays and all the information and write it on the box, but a lot of people don't read the box. They just like looking at the pretty picture. Even things as sophisticated as video displays. Again, people wouldn't watch them. A lot of the stores you'd go in and they'd be switched off and you'd think, "Hmm, competition's spending an awful lot of money on that display and it's not even plugged in because it's in the middle of the floor and there wasn't a PowerPoint in the middle of the floor." Yep, that really happened. So little brief summary. We're not at the end just yet, but brief summary. Look at the fact you're going to have competition. Deal with the fact you're going to have competition. Use the fact that you're going to have competition. Now, we're not so used to the fact, the obvious one is use it to improve your own products. Look at how the competition are doing things. Look at the perception within the community, within the buying area that you're working in. Is there a perception that the competition has managed to produce a good product? Are people talking about it? If so, then consider why they consider it's a good product. Is there an element of inspiration? Things are not exclusive. Too many people think that they've come up with the world's greatest pot plant holder. Then they get a little bit upset when they see that there's another company making a pot plant holder. There's almost a case of, "They've copied me. I'm going to sue." It's like, "Don't waste your money." So look at competition as a positive. Things not to do with competition. Now, I've already alluded to a couple of these. One is don't diss the competition. Never ever, ever, ever diss the competition. They are a legitimate business, generally, and they are selling products to customers. They're selling products to customers who could be your customers as well. If you turn around to people and go, "Company X, it's a load of rubbish, especially if you do it in social media or do it in public or just do it to an e-person," then people are going to get miffed because they've bought that product. Now effectively, you're telling them that they're an idiot, so do not diss the competition. The competition might be dissing you, and we have been in that position several times, in fact. Now, we're always going to say, "Yeah, our products are better if you ask us directly," but we're not going to say it in the same manner as, "There's a shit." It's down to, "We prefer our designs." Well, we should do because we design them. We prefer the way we operate our items, and we can offer you advice on how you get the products that you've purchased in the competition to work with our items. Never ever diss the competition. If you are really mad, and there are a number of companies who've done this before, the classic ones are the burger companies, Burger King. In the UK, we have companies like Ryan Air, who will involve the competition in their advertising in a slightly negative manner. In other words, they're taking the piss out of them. Excuse my French. I would not do that as a small business. For the very simple reason, it's really, really, really easy to shoot yourself in the foot, and suddenly you find cease and desist letters appearing, and it gets very nasty. If large companies are doing it to other large companies, they tend to have a lot of legal backups so they know exactly what to say and how to say it. It's done tongue in cheek, and they get away with it. Sometimes you do look at them and go, "Really? If you're on threads, Channel 4, go and look at Channel 4. It's hilarious." So all they seem to do is have a go at ITV. It's quite funny. It's quite hilarious. If I was going to do that to another company, I would like to have a large bank of lawyers behind me and a lot of money to deal with the cease and desist, et cetera. Never ever diss the competition. The competition exists. You can't stop it. Just accept the fact it's there. Buy the same manner. Don't penalize your customers because they decided to buy from the competition. The market is large enough for you and the competition, and probably more than the competition. Your market is the size of the world, potentially. I recently had a conversation with a great guy, and hopefully he's listening to this podcast spot because I did tell him to. He's got some competition at the moment, and he's quite upset of the way the competition had been operating quite rightly because there's definitely some behind-the-back stabbing going on. The advice is accept the fact this is going to happen because you aren't successful. The competition see you as a threat. The way to deal with those threats is to be professional at all times. The competition might say these things about you, but when people actually come across you and deal with you directly, so they're not listening to all the derogatory comments, they suddenly realize that what they've been told in the past is wrong. If what they've been told in the past about you is wrong, then maybe more of what they've been told is wrong. Then you've got into that situation where they're doubting what the competition is saying and listening to more what you're saying. The competition have actually shot themselves in the foot. Never, ever, ever diss the competition. I have a competition in my business. I have at least three other manufacturers who are doing exactly what I do. We'll visit them on their stand. We'll say hi. We won't generally talk about business, so we're not going to sit there on the stand and go, "What you've got that's new?" We already know what you've got that's new because we follow you on social media. We look at your products. We buy your products as soon as they come out. It's always useful to just be able to chat to people. At the end of the day, it's actually quite nice just to be polite and professional. It's a very good stance to be when you're dealing with people who are working in your industry. You never know in the future that competition might change. For us, it did in a massive manner. When we first went into the industry, there was a company that produced what was considered at the time to be the Rolls Royce product within our industry. However, five years ago, the competition approached us and asked to stock some of our products. That was a jaw-dropping moment. That was a situation where we've got a company that has been the major competitor in our market for 15 years, and now they want to stock one of our products. What did we do? The answer is we said yes. Why did we say yes? Well, we're a business. The only rule was they weren't allowed to make this product look like theirs, so it was still our branded product. It was one of those complementary products. It wasn't identical to what they're actually manufacturing. It was something that their customers potentially would buy with their product. Again, it comes back down to the customers bought A from your competitors. What can they buy from you that will complement it? In our case, the particular items that the competition were buying were so complementary to their product, they decided they wanted to stock them. They didn't copy them. They decided they wanted to stock them, and even to this day, they still stock some of our products. Actually, I've now reached that point where I've covered everything that I can think of in relation to competition. It's really simple. At the end of the day, competition exists except here. Deal with the competition. Use it to your benefit. Make it work for you. Use it to improve your product. Use it to improve your service. See it as a positive. If there's no competition within your marketplace, do you actually have a market that you're working in? If you don't have any competition at the moment, be prepared to see competition if your market becomes successful. Don't be negative against your competition. Accept the fact that they're there. Always be professional. Always be polite. Don't diss the competition. Accept the fact that your customers are going to buy from your competition. Use that. If they're going to buy from your competition, provide them with opportunities to purchase from you. Give them choice. At the end of the day, they've already made a choice. They bought something from the competition. You want to improve that choice element because you want them to purchase something from you. That's the nature of what you're trying to do. Ideally, I'd like them to buy everything from me. It's not going to happen all of the time. You can get people to hopefully buy into your product and your product range, but at the end of the day, it's not going to happen. Let's be realistic. People are still going to buy from the competition purely and simply because they might be local to them. It might be in their local store and you're not, or they've never heard of you. They are things that you need to rectify over time. Never ever, ever, ever, ever compete on price alone. If you're going to compete on price, have a very large wallet and expect to lose large amounts of money, especially when you're dealing with larger companies, because at the end of the day, larger companies can just turn around and go, "We're going to sell it below cost." What do you mean?
You can sell that item as a loss leader below the cost of us making it because we make other products therefore we can absorb the cost. Now you're in that position where you can't compete because they're selling at half the price that you're selling at. Lastly, just remember one thing. You are you, they are they. You are different. You are producing something that, yep, it's in the same market, but you can compete. You can compete and succeed and that is the way to do business. That's the end of the podcast. Hopefully I've given you some ideas as to how to deal with competition. Please, please, please always consider competition to be a good thing. If you get too negative about competition, you're going to find your life gets hell because all you're going to do is worry about what everyone else is doing. Don't worry about what other people are doing. Be aware of what other people are doing. At the end of the day, it's your business and you're running it for your customers. Worry about your business and worry about your customers. Anyway, thanks for listening. Be safe and have fun. Bye.
Now, competition is something that can generate so much angst, particularly in new businesses, they look at the business world and think, this is just my business and my business world. And yet there are other people out there who have their own ideas. They're probably working in the same area that you're working in. And you have competition. The first thing you need to do is accept the fact that there is competition. Competition can be a good thing and competition can be a bad thing. A lot of it actually depends on how you deal with it. The first thing you need to realize is firstly, it exists. Secondly, it's actually a positive for your business. Why is it positive for your business? The simple answer is if there's competition out there, then there's clearly a market for whatever you're producing. Because if there wasn't a market, there wouldn't be someone out there before you who's trying to sell a similar product or at least sell into the same market that you're looking at. If there isn't anyone selling, then you could argue that at that point in time, there isn't going to be any competition, which initially could be a good thing because initially it means the market is open to you. However, I guarantee if you end up going into a market where there is zero competition, one of two things are going to happen. One, you're going to discover the reason there is no competition is because actually there's no market. Or two, you're going to discover very quickly that somebody else sees what you're doing and jumps in in the same market so you don't have competition. Now, that competition in that situation, a lot of people immediately jump up and down and go, they're copying me. It happens. It's one of those things. If you have a success within business, somebody else will come along and they will try to copy you. It might take six weeks. It might take six hours. It might take 20 years. In my particular business, it's taken probably 15 years before we started to see people trying to copy us. More recently, we've actually had designs that were almost direct copies of what we do. There's not a lot you can do about it. You can spend money trying to protect your designs. You can use copyrights. You can use registered designs. Unfortunately, all of that costs money. Given that we're all in a worldwide selling environment, you would have to protect it in all of the major locations throughout the world. That simply is not possible if you're a small business. If you've got the money to do that, you're probably not a small business. So the first thing is, accept the fact that you're going to get competition. The second thing I would say, if you've got competition, observe them. See how they operate. Look at their products. Be objective. Are these products better than yours? Now, initially, people are always going to say, no, my product's better. But you have to really be objective. You have to look at their product and go, have they created something that is potentially better from a user's perspective than what I have produced? If that's the case, then my answer is learn from it. It doesn't necessarily mean it's better. It just means the perception of that particular element of their product could be better. For a lot of people, they don't look at an individual element. They look at the whole. So there's almost a case of, yeah, they might have done something slightly better in that respect, but the whole thing, the whole package is not what a customer is looking for. Don't get too stressed. If you look at it and go, wow, they're better than me. One thing I do need to say at this point is something that's really, really simple. Never, ever, ever compete on price or certainly don't compete on price alone. If you look at their product and it's similar to yours or it's selling in a similar market, if their price is lower, do not consider dropping your price to go below theirs. It doesn't work. The only person who manages to win that battle is the one that has the largest wallet. And a lot of the time it's a never ending game. If they're substantially cheaper than you, then maybe you need to question whether your pricing structure is actually something that the market can withstand. If you're producing something for fifty dollars, fifty pounds, and they're producing exactly the same thing and it's ten dollars, then you really need to look at your pricing structure. Equally, you need to look at their pricing structure. Is it really equivalent? I mean, we use the allergy of a potter making a pot, custom made pot to a particular specification made of clay that's been dug up from the river. Amazon chipped around the world and is handmade compared with a cup from your local Target or as the yeah, there's no comparison. The functionality is it's a cup. The cup from as to target is going to be five dollars, five pounds. When you look at comparison, you need to be truly objective and go, is this in the same market? Yes, it's a cup. It's in the same market. But if you're making custom cups, you're a potter making it out of specialized clay. No, that is not in the same market. You will get customers turning around and going, I can get a cup for that price. Then it comes into you need to explain why your cup is completely different to the cup that they're comparing it to. You will find that there are people out there, companies out there who are in the same market issue. So there's another potter in the world making a custom pot out of specialized clay. And if they're five times your price, then either there's something really weird with your pricing or they could be something really weird with their pricing and they're just they want to price themselves at that level. So never compete on price unless it's at extreme levels. And then it's a case of you really have to look at why the pricing is so different. Is it a case of you moved into a market where there wasn't anyone else so they felt that they could charge anything? If you're in that situation, which I mentioned at the beginning, where you perceive there is no competition at the time, you do then get to choose what the pricing is. How much would people wish to pay for something? That's where you then get into the, well, I lost my friends and family and they'll give you answers which will be meaningless. Oh, I'll pay anything for that because you made it. Yeah, it doesn't work that way. You really need to look at the market and look at how much you think the market can withstand. That's enough about pricing. I am going to do a podcast about pricing at some point in time, but we're looking at competition. You might be confused by my first comment, which was competition is a good thing. Hold it. They're taking some of my markets away. People are going to buy the products from them instead of me. And the answer is, yep, to a certain extent that will occur. However, one thing it's doing is one, it's demonstrating there is a market there because somebody else has done their research and gone, there's a market for me to sell my product positive there. But equally, they're broadening the market in terms of they are bringing your product style to a larger audience. At the moment, you're not going to be spending vast amounts on advertising. But if you've got another company making similar product, they're going to be spending money on advertising or they're going to be using social media for advertising, probably. But the point is their market share and your market share will never dovetail exactly unless you're making exactly the same item and attempting to sell to exactly the same people. And if you are, I would suggest you look at your market and try and drift off to the side. Again, I'll look at marketing and markets in a future podcast. But the fundamental here is you've got two companies or a minimum of two companies running into a marketplace, which the marketplace in all is massive. It's the world. We're in that situation where we have competition. They're broadening the market. They are selling items to the public and you're selling items to the public. The first thing I said at the beginning was know the competition. Go and purchase their product. Be objective. Purchase the product. Look at how they're doing something and then analyze how it's used and then look to see if you've got anything in your range that would complement it. Now, when I say complement it, it's something along the lines of, OK, you've come across a customer who's purchased something from the competition. Is there any way that you can sell them something from your range that works with the product that they have purchased that complements the product they have purchased? If there is, you're now in a situation where you've just sold a product to a customer, which is the end of the day. That's what we're trying to do. The key here is you're complementing it. What you're not doing is basically turning around to the customer and saying, you bought rubbish, buy it from me instead, because what you're actually doing there is being very negative with the customer. And you're telling the customer effectively that they're an idiot because they've made a purchase that now you're saying is rubbish. Indirectly, you're saying it's not great. You should have bought something else. Never ever, ever tell a customer that they made a wrong decision. Always look at a customer as a person who's made a decision based on their own criteria. They've purchased that product from your competition, but for some reason, they're still looking at you. Now, is that because their competition doesn't offer exactly what they're looking for or is it a case of they're trying to justify their purchase? If they're trying to justify their purchase, then maybe they're unsure about their purchase. So again, is there something that you can do that can enhance their purchase? Can you sell them some accessories? Who knows? The point is if you don't understand the competition's products, how can you put yourself in a position where you can sell on the back of somebody else's purchase from the competition? You will also find as you get further into any industry, people will ask you questions about the products that other manufacturers make. Sometimes they're expecting you to come out with some conversation about, "Yeah, I don't really like those." Be professional. You might find that the competition are the most obnoxious bunch of currencies there are, and you might hate their product. But again, don't diss their product. The customer spent their money on that product. What you now need to do is to ensure the customer trusts you to purchase from you. So if the customer asks you, "I've bought this product. Do you do anything that works with this product?" Hopefully the answer is going to be, "Yes." Or maybe they're asking, "I bought this product and I'm having a problem with X, Y, and Z." Well, the answer then is, "Okay, well, I haven't come across that element before. However, maybe I can help with this." Be helpful. Even if it's a case of the customer is not going to buy from you today, a lot of customers will remember these conversations, and they then come along and they buy from you in six months. We talked about some tactics to deal with competition, but we haven't talked about some of the obvious ones, which are sell more than the competition. And the answer to that is, now we talked about what to do with the competition, but we've possibly missed the major one, which is the, "How do I induce a customer to buy from me and not buy from the competition?" And the answer to that is, you need to be better than the competition. And when I say better, not just better in the product, but better in everything, the service, the way you deal with the customers. If you can be better in the price, do not compete on price alone, but a lower price to the competition is always a positive from a customer's perspective. Then you need to look at the more basic concepts. One is, be different. Yes, there are two of you in this competition. In fact, there's possibly more than two of you. When I first entered the business that I was operating in, there were, I think, about four companies offering similar products. And when I say similar, some people consider them to be almost the same. They all had the basic functionality. The key for me was coming along and saying, "I'm going to do it, but I'm going to do it differently." It wasn't just the case of the product was different and our products were certainly different. It was the way we dealt with customers. It was the way we provided information after sales support. All of these things, which all added up to a different experience to buying from the competition. The competition had a greater reach than us. They were in more stores when we started. In fact, they were in stores when we started and we weren't in any stores. But there were still people coming to us saying, "We'll want to buy from you," because the perception was we had a better product. And we did. That's the nature of what we do as a business. We believe our product is better than other people's, but we can't sit there shouting about it all the time because it sounds very sanctimonious. People after a while just get bored of it and go, "He's just saying the same thing again and again and again." A bit like this podcast, really. I will move on. If you've got competition, look to see how you can be different. Also ask yourself why are the customers purchasing from your competition and not purchasing from you? Fundamentally, it might be just simply people don't know about you. That is something that's going to take time. We did really well within our business because people would talk about us. Now, word of mouth is great until it goes all wrong and then you have to deal with word of mouth with people criticizing and complaining about you. And yes, there will be a podcast about how to deal with that. But word of mouth is a great advertising medium. People talk. People buy from their friends. And that, for me, is actually one of the key elements. And again, I'll talk about this in another podcast. Buying from your friends. You tend to buy from people that you like and you tend to buy from people you trust. Unless you're going into the local supermarket and you're just buying something off the shelf and then you're not really buying anything from somebody. You're just walking in, picking a product up and walking out the door. And we actually found ourselves in a situation where we were dealing with stores with products on the shelf and that's how they would sell them. Our product never really worked as a straight pull it off the shelf because you had to have some understanding about how to use the product. We were that specialized. Now, you could put all your displays and all the information and write it on the box, but a lot of people don't read the box. They just like looking at the pretty picture. Even things as sophisticated as video displays. Again, people wouldn't watch them. A lot of the stores you'd go in and they'd be switched off and you'd think, "Hmm, competition's spending an awful lot of money on that display and it's not even plugged in because it's in the middle of the floor and there wasn't a PowerPoint in the middle of the floor." Yep, that really happened. So little brief summary. We're not at the end just yet, but brief summary. Look at the fact you're going to have competition. Deal with the fact you're going to have competition. Use the fact that you're going to have competition. Now, we're not so used to the fact, the obvious one is use it to improve your own products. Look at how the competition are doing things. Look at the perception within the community, within the buying area that you're working in. Is there a perception that the competition has managed to produce a good product? Are people talking about it? If so, then consider why they consider it's a good product. Is there an element of inspiration? Things are not exclusive. Too many people think that they've come up with the world's greatest pot plant holder. Then they get a little bit upset when they see that there's another company making a pot plant holder. There's almost a case of, "They've copied me. I'm going to sue." It's like, "Don't waste your money." So look at competition as a positive. Things not to do with competition. Now, I've already alluded to a couple of these. One is don't diss the competition. Never ever, ever, ever diss the competition. They are a legitimate business, generally, and they are selling products to customers. They're selling products to customers who could be your customers as well. If you turn around to people and go, "Company X, it's a load of rubbish, especially if you do it in social media or do it in public or just do it to an e-person," then people are going to get miffed because they've bought that product. Now effectively, you're telling them that they're an idiot, so do not diss the competition. The competition might be dissing you, and we have been in that position several times, in fact. Now, we're always going to say, "Yeah, our products are better if you ask us directly," but we're not going to say it in the same manner as, "There's a shit." It's down to, "We prefer our designs." Well, we should do because we design them. We prefer the way we operate our items, and we can offer you advice on how you get the products that you've purchased in the competition to work with our items. Never ever diss the competition. If you are really mad, and there are a number of companies who've done this before, the classic ones are the burger companies, Burger King. In the UK, we have companies like Ryan Air, who will involve the competition in their advertising in a slightly negative manner. In other words, they're taking the piss out of them. Excuse my French. I would not do that as a small business. For the very simple reason, it's really, really, really easy to shoot yourself in the foot, and suddenly you find cease and desist letters appearing, and it gets very nasty. If large companies are doing it to other large companies, they tend to have a lot of legal backups so they know exactly what to say and how to say it. It's done tongue in cheek, and they get away with it. Sometimes you do look at them and go, "Really? If you're on threads, Channel 4, go and look at Channel 4. It's hilarious." So all they seem to do is have a go at ITV. It's quite funny. It's quite hilarious. If I was going to do that to another company, I would like to have a large bank of lawyers behind me and a lot of money to deal with the cease and desist, et cetera. Never ever diss the competition. The competition exists. You can't stop it. Just accept the fact it's there. Buy the same manner. Don't penalize your customers because they decided to buy from the competition. The market is large enough for you and the competition, and probably more than the competition. Your market is the size of the world, potentially. I recently had a conversation with a great guy, and hopefully he's listening to this podcast spot because I did tell him to. He's got some competition at the moment, and he's quite upset of the way the competition had been operating quite rightly because there's definitely some behind-the-back stabbing going on. The advice is accept the fact this is going to happen because you aren't successful. The competition see you as a threat. The way to deal with those threats is to be professional at all times. The competition might say these things about you, but when people actually come across you and deal with you directly, so they're not listening to all the derogatory comments, they suddenly realize that what they've been told in the past is wrong. If what they've been told in the past about you is wrong, then maybe more of what they've been told is wrong. Then you've got into that situation where they're doubting what the competition is saying and listening to more what you're saying. The competition have actually shot themselves in the foot. Never, ever, ever diss the competition. I have a competition in my business. I have at least three other manufacturers who are doing exactly what I do. We'll visit them on their stand. We'll say hi. We won't generally talk about business, so we're not going to sit there on the stand and go, "What you've got that's new?" We already know what you've got that's new because we follow you on social media. We look at your products. We buy your products as soon as they come out. It's always useful to just be able to chat to people. At the end of the day, it's actually quite nice just to be polite and professional. It's a very good stance to be when you're dealing with people who are working in your industry. You never know in the future that competition might change. For us, it did in a massive manner. When we first went into the industry, there was a company that produced what was considered at the time to be the Rolls Royce product within our industry. However, five years ago, the competition approached us and asked to stock some of our products. That was a jaw-dropping moment. That was a situation where we've got a company that has been the major competitor in our market for 15 years, and now they want to stock one of our products. What did we do? The answer is we said yes. Why did we say yes? Well, we're a business. The only rule was they weren't allowed to make this product look like theirs, so it was still our branded product. It was one of those complementary products. It wasn't identical to what they're actually manufacturing. It was something that their customers potentially would buy with their product. Again, it comes back down to the customers bought A from your competitors. What can they buy from you that will complement it? In our case, the particular items that the competition were buying were so complementary to their product, they decided they wanted to stock them. They didn't copy them. They decided they wanted to stock them, and even to this day, they still stock some of our products. Actually, I've now reached that point where I've covered everything that I can think of in relation to competition. It's really simple. At the end of the day, competition exists except here. Deal with the competition. Use it to your benefit. Make it work for you. Use it to improve your product. Use it to improve your service. See it as a positive. If there's no competition within your marketplace, do you actually have a market that you're working in? If you don't have any competition at the moment, be prepared to see competition if your market becomes successful. Don't be negative against your competition. Accept the fact that they're there. Always be professional. Always be polite. Don't diss the competition. Accept the fact that your customers are going to buy from your competition. Use that. If they're going to buy from your competition, provide them with opportunities to purchase from you. Give them choice. At the end of the day, they've already made a choice. They bought something from the competition. You want to improve that choice element because you want them to purchase something from you. That's the nature of what you're trying to do. Ideally, I'd like them to buy everything from me. It's not going to happen all of the time. You can get people to hopefully buy into your product and your product range, but at the end of the day, it's not going to happen. Let's be realistic. People are still going to buy from the competition purely and simply because they might be local to them. It might be in their local store and you're not, or they've never heard of you. They are things that you need to rectify over time. Never ever, ever, ever, ever compete on price alone. If you're going to compete on price, have a very large wallet and expect to lose large amounts of money, especially when you're dealing with larger companies, because at the end of the day, larger companies can just turn around and go, "We're going to sell it below cost." What do you mean?
You can sell that item as a loss leader below the cost of us making it because we make other products therefore we can absorb the cost. Now you're in that position where you can't compete because they're selling at half the price that you're selling at. Lastly, just remember one thing. You are you, they are they. You are different. You are producing something that, yep, it's in the same market, but you can compete. You can compete and succeed and that is the way to do business. That's the end of the podcast. Hopefully I've given you some ideas as to how to deal with competition. Please, please, please always consider competition to be a good thing. If you get too negative about competition, you're going to find your life gets hell because all you're going to do is worry about what everyone else is doing. Don't worry about what other people are doing. Be aware of what other people are doing. At the end of the day, it's your business and you're running it for your customers. Worry about your business and worry about your customers. Anyway, thanks for listening. Be safe and have fun. Bye.
