Tips for Developing Strategies to Overcome Competition in Business

Competition includes all the actual and potential rival offerings and substitutes a buyer might consider. This includes actual and potential offerings from industry operators, potential new entrants and market competitors.

The ability to identify and analyze all actual and potential competitors to your business is key to surviving in a fierce market place, keeps you ahead of them and helps you develop strategies to overcome them. To analyze its competitors, a company must identify its competitor’s strategies, objectives, strengths and weaknesses and then device its own strategies to overcome them. It must also have a clear understanding of the environment it operates in. Understand that the environment you operate in is similar to that of your competitors. Learning how to overcome the challenges in your business environment is a step towards overcoming the competitor.

Companies are also increasingly being faced by the threat of buyers growing bargaining power and suppliers growing bargaining power. As such companies must spend time to research and understand its actual and potential customers, what they expect from them, how to exceed their expectations as well as what influences their buying patterns. Exceeding customer expectations is no mean feat. In today’s business world, customers are increasingly knowledgeable about product choices, service standards and above all consumer rights, hence the increase in buyers bargaining power. Exceeding customer expectations has become a must do for any business that is serious about gaining market share, loyalty and customer trust. You must understand that if you are unable to impress potential customers and keep your current customers loyal to your brand then you have already lost to the competitor no matter the strategy you choose to adopt.

Understand that the customer is the reason why you are in business and not the competitor. If the product offering and service delivery is excellently superb, then your competitors will naturally have a hard time keeping up with you even if you have not deliberately prepared an attacking strategy to defeat them. Understanding the customer is the first step towards building a strategy that will keep them coming back to you. Therefore, in other to defeat your competitors you will need to:

·         acquire practical skills that will enable you to understand what customers expect from you,

·         exceed their expectations on product and service delivery,

·         understand what drives their behavior when buying,

·         understand how the environment you operate in can affect you and your competitors,

·         get a clear understanding of who your competitor is and what they may be up to,

·         Develop strategies that will help you attack the competitor and effectively defend your flanks.

The strategies available to a company will depend on the strength of opposition it is facing, its distinctive competencies, the expectations of its customers, the conditions prevalent in its environment, its resource capabilities, the cost/benefit derivable from the application of the strategy and its current position within the market.

Valentine Okolo

To get the course "Overcoming Competition in Business" please click the Course button on the right or, please visit Braincert at https://www.braincert.com/course/Overcoming-Competition-in-Business