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How Your Competitor Can Help Your Business

By: William King

Competition is normally seen in a negative way, someone who runs off with your market share and profits. Business competitors are eager to take advantage of any mistake we make, and use wicked offers to attract our clientele towards them. Being a monopolist in your field may well be quite rewarding, but it’s very rare to be the only one in some particular business.

Even if it’s some exclusive idea, your success will soon tempt others into it. Competition cannot be ignored, but instead of getting frustrated by it, you should take it in a realistic and positive way. Competition can be helpful in these ways:

Keeps you on your toes:
Many a times, you need competition to bring out the best from you. You never know your true potential until you get into some competition. It keeps you thinking. The thought of loosing your reputation and profits to someone else makes you work hard and strive for improvement.

Innovation:
To gain competitive advantage you have to come up with innovations. Businesses are always trying to offer something new. Products and services are more and less the same, they have to come up with some added value which is new and unique. Without competition, consumers are bound to buy the only option available; no improvement is needed at manufacturer’s end. It’s the competition that makes these innovations occur.

Learn from their experience:
You can always learn from their experiences. If some new product was introduced which fails in attracting customers, or it gains popularity in no time, in both cases you have got something to learn. Observe the market trend and customer’s reaction to changes tried by your competitor. Spying generally is not a good idea but you must keep an eye on your competitor’s pace and direction.

Weaknesses & Strength:
Every business has its weaknesses and strengths, some boost on their technological superiority, some have skilled human resource, some have efficient management. Your competitor’s success or failures can easily be traced down to one major factor, which is the prime reason for their success or failure. You can work on that particular factor to succeed, or avoid the failure which they have faced.

Makes you realize the value of your customers:
Customers are the center of every business. You realize this fact more when competing for each and every customer available in market. It makes you do something more for your customers to sustain them, like adding value to your products, improving your customer support service or adjusting prices.


Author Resource:-> William King is the director of UK Wholesalers & Dropshipper Suppliers Trade Directory , Worldwide Dropshippers & Dropshipping Suppliers Directory , Wholesalers & Dropshippers & Dropshipping Suppliers Directory and Wholesalers & Wholesale Suppliers Trade Directory. He has 18 years of experience in the marketing and trading industries and has been helping retailers and startups with their product sourcing, promotion, marketing and supply chain requirements.

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Importance of Branding: What's in a Name?

By: William King

Branding is perhaps the most important facet of any business--beyond product, distribution, pricing, or location. A company's brand is its definition in the world, the name that identifies it to itself and the marketplace. A model may be beautiful, but without a name, she's just "that girl in that picture." Where would Norma Jean be without Marilyn Monroe, or who would imagine Coca-Cola as just a soft-drink manufacturer? A brand provides a concrete descriptor to customers and competitors alike, a name for a product or service to distinguish it from anything else. Bob may run a hobby shop, but trying to advertise as "The hobby shop a guy named Bob runs down the street a ways" is financial suicide. Each customer will have to describe the shop, who Bob is, and what the shop does every time someone asks about it. This makes the process of recommending a good hobby shop too much work for the average customer, and far too much work for a user looking for hobby shops on the Internet. A customer looking up Bob's hobby shop will have an easier time of it if he or she knows to refer to it as "Bob's House of Hobbies," and the customer can then refer others to Bob's hobby shop by name, increasing the potential advertising exponentially.

Developing a brand involves more than just picking a catchy name and placing an ad in the newspaper--a brand is more than a unique string of letters denoting a particular product; a successful brand is a mnemonic trigger that makes a consumer feel a certain way when the brand is thought of. For those who drink cola-flavored soft drinks, which is more appealing on a hot day: a cold cola soda, or an ice-cold Coke? Coca-Cola has spent 100 years developing their particular brand of cola-flavored soda as a refreshing beverage and a seminal representation of a market segment. Coca-Cola has used a combination of direct marketing, give-away techniques, and multi-product cross-branding to achieve maximum brand recognition and visibility in not only its immediately competitive market, but in markets as diverse as Coca-Cola branded race cars and house wares.

Brand loyalty is an integral part of building a brand, as consumers usually have a choice of products in the same market segment, and so a successful company will come up with a way to keep consumers re-buying their product or coming back to their location rather than going to a competitor. These brand loyalty-building efforts may come in the form of coupons, incentives such as many grocery chains' technique of "grocery discount cards" or "loss leaders," meant to draw consumers into the store, where they will hopefully buy products along with the discounted fare at a higher profit ratio. In exchange for these discounts and grocery cards, many companies collect information about buying habits and average spending amounts, the better to tailor advertisements and better-focus future promotional efforts. Once a consumer is hooked, brand loyalty tends to result in higher sales volume, as well as loyal customers being less sensitive to price changes of their favorite brands (within reason, of course), as well as less sensitive to competitors' incentives. Studies have shown that it takes 5 times as much money to gain a customer as it does to retain one. That's 5 times as much money as could have been spent on other things.

A brand is who your company is, and what it is selling--it is as important as naming a baby, and should require the same amount of effort to develop it, but if done well, can mature into a successful and profitable adult.

© 2005, Wholesale Pages UK. All rights reserved.

Author Resource:-> William King is the director of UK Wholesale Suppliers, Wholesale Suppliers , Drop shipping Directory and Pakistan Property Portal . He has 18 years of experience in the marketing and trading industries and has been helping retailers and startups with their product sourcing, promotion, marketing and supply chain requirements.

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Stocks keep gains after Federal Reserve giving evidence that economy is getting stabilize. The USA had face massive of jobs lost ever seen since the Great Depression, people loosing their homes and worst of all their retirement. But, on September 10th, stocks gain after job report ( a drop of unemployment claims). Finally recession is over, but it will take a lot of more work from the government to stabilize the USA?