If you have a product or service that people genuinely value and the operational capacity to supply and distribute it, there’s only one thing that can stand in the way of your business goals: competition. In a hyper-competitive business environment, your business may struggle to achieve visibility — or you may hemorrhage customers to other brands in your space.
In a digital-first world, a business’s competition isn’t limited to another shop just down the … [+]
How can you make sure your business can thrive in such a hostile field?
Beat the Rush
One option is to “beat the rush” by establishing your business in an industry or niche before your competitors have a chance to threaten your market footprint. This is known as the first-mover advantage, and there are many historical examples of companies that have benefited tremendously from this strategy.
One of the most popular and well-recognized is eBay, which was the first fully-functional online auction website and remains one of the biggest marketplaces on the web. This is in spite of the fact that there’s been nearly 30 years to witness the rise of a dominant competitor.
It’s hard to forecast the new products and services that will become popular, especially when it comes to tech-related products and services. Few people in 1995 would have guessed that online auctions would become so influential. Today’s savviest business owners are attempting to predict what the next “gold rush” will be, so they can gain a first-mover advantage in their respective field.
An example of this is the Intelligence Exchange, a company that’s been around since 2018 but has recently expanded its scope. TIEX was an early mover in the realm of artificial intelligence. The company used AI to create “intelligence exchanges” and marketplaces for the food, auto, CPG, and logistics industries. In an effort to become a first mover in the realm of Web3, TIEX is introducing NFTs and smart contracts that allow creators of AI- and ML-based products to collaborate, embrace digital ownership, and even earn royalties for their work. This should democratize access to intelligence models.
Acquire More Capital
More money means more options. If you’re better at fundraising, you’ll have more capital than your contemporaries, and more capital means you can hire more people, solve problems faster, and achieve higher levels of resilience in the face of economic tumult or market shifts.
Capital also enables you to pursue aggressive strategies like blitzscaling, which can help your business achieve a first-mover advantage at scale (usually a global scale), even if your earliest stages of development were plagued with tough competitors.
Be the Best
Here’s an easy way to beat your competitors: just be better!
If only it were that easy. Chances are, you won’t be able to beat even a single competitor in every category within the confines of a competitive market, but you can beat them in at least one category. That might be enough to uniquely differentiate your business.
Think about ways in which you can be the best. For example:
- Product capabilities. Can you make a product that’s objectively better than everything else on the market?
- Service value. Can you provide more services or better services that lead to customer perception of greater value?
- Price. Are you able to offer similar products and services for a lower price without demolishing your profit margins in the process?
- Customer service. Can you improve the overall customer experience by offering better service and more robust support?
- Demographic appeal. Can you better appeal to a specific demographic, making your company the default choice for a segment of your otherwise shared customer pool?
Any way you can stand out as better than your competitors is often worth pursuing.
Choose a More Specific Niche
You can also limit your competition by forging a business that serves a more focused niche. Serving a specific industry, targeting a particular demographic, or operating only in a finite geographic area may limit some of your business’s earning potential, but it also sharply limits the influence your competitors can have and sets the stage for your business to become truly dominant in this area.
Admeal is an example of a modern company catering to a specific niche. Countless businesses are attempting to use decentralized technologies like blockchain to allow individual users to earn tokens, collaborate, and even monetize their own data, but Admeal differentiates itself by focusing exclusively on the food and recipe industry. Users of this platform can monetize their personal cooking data, earning both real and virtual experiences in the process. Amateur and professional chefs, recipe enthusiasts, food brands, and CPGs are just some of the culinary entities that stand to benefit.
You may never be able to vanquish your competitors, and there’s a chance they’ll still be bigger or more profitable than you even after implementing strategies like these. But your business will be able to thrive, generating consistent revenue and achieving iterative growth, despite the competitive conditions.
