Ideas on how to crush your competitors.

Even if you're not in a position to decimate your competitors just yet, you can still plan for future strategies.

How do you plan to beat down your competitors in business:
Dominance of the market from huge capital reserves/buying power?
Superior customer service/sales skills?
Creative & effective marketing campaigns?
Innovative ideas, new products, new presentation, new services?
All of the above?

It's pretty easy to just beat the next guy, but dominating your market is a different story.
Even the big players have weaknesses, how will you exploit them?
Please contribute your ideas to crush your competition.

 

Be the best not the cheapest. A race to see who can make the least amount of money doesnt give you the financial stability to invest in R&D and marketing.

While the price dumpers and undercutters are busy running themselves out of business, the dominant force's continual brand reinforcement is in the minds of those not purely cost focused.

 

Most definitely "All of the Above". Plus you need to offer something (maybe outside the box) that your competitors don't.

 

Innovative ideas...and excellent customer Service

 

Trying to beat down your competitors is a competitive strategy. Harvard's Michael Porter famously states in order to have a competitive advantage, you need to either differentiate or to be the lowest cost producer.

There's also a great article on 'Blue Ocean Strategy', which describes rather than try to compete with your competitors (where everyone loses and it end up being a blood bath).... You can create a uncontested markplace - a blue ocean. There is a case study in the article about the business model of cirque du soleil.

https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&...o58H4TWwL17Y5afRQ&sig2=GF94VQs5cBD9AcCQ0eIy3A

 

Good article, thanks.
I feel that I have unknowingly adopted the blue ocean strategy in the past, but being more conscious of it now, will plan some bigger moves to differentiate.

 

With a blue ocean strategy, you create uncontested market space to make the competition irrelevant... by simultaneously pursuing low cost and value innovation at the same time.

An example in your industry would be 24/7 gyms when they first started 10 years ago. They reduced cost by taking out the things that customers were paying for but didn't really want (like full service, swimming pools, etc); and created value innovation by offering things that had never been offered before (24/7 access, no-lock in contracts, etc).

The biggest problem for the 24/7 gyms was maintaining the competitive advantage - the cost of entry was relatively low (they're everywhere now!); and the big players have caught on, and are now converting their full service model to the 24/7 model.

 

That's a good example actually. The 24/7 gyms really are a genius business model. Very low overheads, low price point for clients, easy access.

It's definitely saturated now but when they first started up profits were significant. A friend of mine has 6 of them.

 

There is a 29 year old I know of who decided to invest in his first anytime fitness franchise at 23... he now has 4 anytime fitness locations under his belt and is living off the reasonably passive income. He even owns the most populated anytime fitness in Sydney!

 

Years ago now.....I was pregnant, so 26 years ago, there was an independent Cinema in Wollonong. Westfield came along & build a 6 Cinema complex for Hoyts across the road. I can't remember what it cost to go to Hoyts back then, I think around $12, but the little independent was $4 for a double feature.

It was a fair way from our place, but Westfield had the best shopping for me at the time & the Cinema was fantastic. Hubby & I used to go there often, and I'd go there during the day sometimes without him. It was a bargain at $4.

Over time, they built a small second Cinema at the top which only seated about 60-70 people, and they were able to show more films. They increased the price to $4 for one movie only and they were always very busy.

In other areas where there were small independent Cinemas, Hoyts was buying them out, so they had no competition, but this small, family owned Cinema bought out the Hoyts.

When we left Wollonong, I think it cost about $8 for a movie, or $10 if you went to Hoyts.

 

You don't have to be the best to dominate an industry. Microsoft. OS/2 Warp was a far superior operating system to Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 but Windows won out because of Microsoft's superior marketing tactics: advertising, exclusive deals to bundle Windows with new PCs etc.

So if you can't compete on quality, make deals to block out your competitors *

* may not be legal in today's regulatory environment

 

And if you go down this path, make billions then use it to make a huge positive impact on the world through philanthropy.