Another aspect of Your Market-Readiness is your awareness of your competition. The word ‘competition’ conjures an image of a predator who is out to destroy our business. But the threat need not come from a player in the same industry. We will now see instances of competition at different levels.

Competition from the same industry : For example, an executive in a Private Sector Bank will really appreciate the advent of new players in aviation as it gives him more choice to travel. But the moment he reaches his office, he will start bemoaning the impact of the presence of a rival in his key accounts. So competition is good, outside our business area, right?

Competition to an off-line Product from an online Service : In fact, we now see a lot of online Productivity suites consisting of word processors, spreadsheets etc like Google Docs & Spreadsheet, Zoho, Scrybe (from Netscape) which might emerge as a threat to MS Office, sometime in the future. The verdict isn’t out yet!

Competition from a totally different Industry :
Consider the greeting card industry in India. The key players and like their counterparts in other developed markets, faced competition initially from emails followed by online greeting cards but it is the ’sms’ facility in the cell phones that is fast replacing the physical cards. So if you were Archies or ITC Expressions and looking over your shoulders at players from UK or USA, you would miss the sms avalanche and lose ground. Fortunately ITC recognized the relevance of these new technologies as a threat to their business and took appropriate action.

Competition from an unrelated Source : For example, my company NRich Software launched a software Product ‘Enrich’ which helps a family in powerfully managing its incomes and expenses. From our various campaigns and analysing the responses of our prospects, we found that single largest objection to the software was the question ’should we key in the details of our transactions?’. So the biggest competitor or threat to the purchase and usage of ‘Enrich’ is ‘Lethargy‘ that is ever present in many human beings. That realization lead us to a feature whereby regular transactions can be created once and populated as per a schedule. In fact, we are always looking at beating this competition through innovation.

Now what? Now that the relevance of competition beyond the traditional understanding has been established, you may like to look at your business and start speculating on the nature of a competing player.

I will be attending on 21st Jan and if you would like to get some assessment of your market readiness, you can send the answers to the 5 questions to
“care (at) nrichsoft.in”