Targeting Guide #10

All competitors aren’t your brand’s competitors; only those brands that are targeting your target customers are your brand’s competitors.

Marketers sometime react to the actions of all other brands in a given product/service category.  This is often a mistake.  Only those brands which are targeting your brand’s target customers are your competitors.  The graphic to the left is a hypothesize segmentation set space.  The market is segmented along two unspecified dimensions.  The brands are positioned in the set space by consumers who bought the brand.  Your brand is the represented by the black diamond in the upper right quadrant of the set space.  Your only real competitive in this example is Competitor 1; it is the only brand purchased by consumers who are similar to your customers.

Over-focusing on competitor actions are sometimes a symptom of being sales oriented rather than marketing oriented.  The salesman often views the commercial process as a battle between his company and the competitors’ companies.  Walking into a dealer only to find a competitor’s salesman walking out the door only helps to foster this belief.  And the belief is deeply internalized if the salesman discovers that the competitor filled the dealer’s inventory.

However, the goal of marketing isn’t to defeat the competitors.  The goal of marketing is to create genuine customer value.  If the marketer is better at creating this genuine customer value than competitors, the competitors will be defeated.  The defeat is a by-product of marketing, not the goal of marketing.