How to Beat the Competition in Business

Introduction

• Rick Kettner discusses strategies to separate your business from the competition and increase profitability.
• Importance of subscribing for future insights.

Mindset Around Competition

• Entrepreneurs often focus too much on rival brands, which can diminish profits.
• Blue Ocean Strategy: Focus on making competition irrelevant.
• Success should be based on creating value for customers rather than competing head-to-head with other businesses.

Strategy 1: Redefine the Market Around Your Strengths

• Importance of associating a market category with your brand.
• Examples of brands that own their categories:
  • Fast Food: McDonald's
  • Coffee Shops: Starbucks
  • Electric Cars: Tesla
  • Streaming: Netflix
  • Ride Sharing: Uber
• Law of Leadership from "The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing": It's better to be first than better.
• If not the leader, create a new category that plays to your strengths.
  • Example: Facebook redefining social networking by focusing on real identities, overtaking Myspace.
  • Example: Instagram creating a mobile-first approach to social media, leading to its acquisition by Facebook.

Strategy 2: Look for Opportunities to Create Value Innovation

• Break the trade-off between adding value and decreasing costs.
• Value innovation focuses on delivering more for less, enhancing customer experience.
• Seek opportunities by understanding customer needs and emerging trends.
• Example: Drumeo, which shifted from traditional private lessons to online lessons, offering better value at a lower price.
  • Emphasizes the need to focus on how to serve customers better.

Strategy 3: Make Use of Uncontested Marketing Channels

• Avoid getting stuck in conventional marketing strategies.
• Example: Tesla, which avoids traditional paid advertising and focuses on PR, unique products, and word-of-mouth.
• Explore various marketing channels and think outside the box to attract customers.
  • Reference: "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares recommends brainstorming marketing channels and testing the most promising ones.

Conclusion

• Recap of the three strategies:
  1. Redefine the market around your strengths.
  2. Create value innovation.
  3. Utilize uncontested marketing channels.
• Focus on customers and how to provide more value.
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