What do you do if your problem-solving skills aren't enough to outsmart brand competition?

If your problem-solving skills aren't sufficient to outsmart brand competition, consider seeking additional expertise or perspectives, conducting thorough market research, refining your strategy, focusing on unique selling points, and leveraging innovation to differentiate your brand. Collaborating with specialists or consulting with industry experts could also provide valuable insights and strategies.

Gain a deep understanding of your target market, customers, and competitors. Conduct comprehensive market research to identify gaps, trends, and opportunities. Analyze your competition's strategies, positioning, and offerings to identify areas where you can differentiate and outperform them.

Is the problem that you're not competitive or that you're too similar? Spend some time deeply analysing a competitor you truly admire. Could you easily be mistaken for them? If so, that's the real problem to solve. And ask if you are truly solving the RIGHT problems for your customers. Most brands get stuck tweaking minor issues while ignoring the giant, unspoken need that could set them apart. Get brutally honest about that. Find someone who's never heard of you OR your competitors. Have them compare your offerings – the uninformed often spot the obvious things you've overlooked. Track changes your competitors are making, such as launching new features or shifting messaging. This may reveal a response to a market shift you're missing.

Step outside the box and seek inspiration from the unlikeliest of places. Explore Beyond Your Industry: Don't limit yourself to familiar territory. Look at how other sectors solve similar problems and borrow their innovative approaches. Challenge the Norms: What accepted "truths" in your industry could be holding you back? Dare to disrupt these conventions and redefine what's possible for your brand.

You can find inspiration in failure. Research brands that crashed and burned publicly or those that got left behind, like Nokia, Kodak, or Blockbuster. Could the same mistakes be lurking in your own strategy? Analysing failure can help motivate you to do things differently and inspire you to look at innovative solutions. Look at things like out-of-business sales and abandoned products. They reveal what customers DON'T want, which can spark an idea for filling that gap. Spend a day analysing businesses that have nothing to do with yours: a zoo, a vintage store, a construction site. How do they attract customers, build loyalty, and handle problems? Force your brain to find connections and gems that you could incorporate into your strategy.

Sometimes you have to look at completely disconnected places to find inspiration. Try to study competition wars from different industries. Analyse the strategies and the outcomes. This should give you a fair idea of the brand wars, The strategies and the results. You can use these findings to get inspired and create your own strategy for your industry and your niche.

1. Engage with diverse departments within your organization to gather varied perspectives and insights. For instance, collaborating with the data analytics team can bring valuable insights that inform more strategic brand decisions. 2. Consider partnering with external experts or agencies to gain fresh vantage points on challenges. This can infuse your problem-solving process with innovative ideas and novel approaches to brand strategy.

Don't just collaborate with people who agree with you. Find people within your organisation or industry who will play "devil's advocate." Their challenge to your ideas will strengthen them or reveal a fatal flaw you'd overlooked. You could also collaborate with people who aren't experts. Find someone outside your industry, even a child. Their naiveté can ask questions that break you out of familiar thinking patterns. Focus on brainstorming wild "what if" scenarios around your problem. (Ex: "What if our customers disappeared overnight?") This gets people out of defensive mode. Often, the problem is that you're not asking the right questions. Frame the challenge, then have collaborators refine the question itself.

Before spending money on courses, find out if there is someone in your organisation or team with a skill you need, even if it's outside the brand and marketing team. Offer a trade: You teach them something, and they mentor you. This will build cross-team skills and empathy. Being successful with brand strategy is about more than your skills; it's about how you think. It's your ability to think disruptively, strategically, and differently from everyone else. Technical skills may not solve your problem. The goal is to force your brain to think in new ways, translating to a more creative strategy. Look at disciplines like psychology that will help with this. This type of course will cross-pollinate ideas and spark new ways of thinking.

AI is great at identifying patterns, but true innovation comes from breaking them. Don't let tech dictate your strategy; instead, use it to free up your creative thinking. Never share something with a client that has been created solely by AI. Don't let tech replace empathy. Use data to understand customers' emotions, not just behaviours. This will reveal the "why" behind the numbers. Utilise tech for speed, not perfection. For example, test new ideas quickly and cheaply using simple tech solutions. This will let you fail and refine fast, which beats a complex tech project taking months. Before adopting a new tool, ask: What does this let me do that I absolutely couldn't do before? If the answer isn't compelling, skip it.

Agility is your greatest ally. Iterate and Innovate: Rapid testing and learning from each campaign can lead to surprising breakthroughs. Embrace Change: Markets evolve, and so should your strategies. Keep ahead by staying open to new ideas and approaches.

Consider enlisting the help of an external brand strategy consultant. A fresh perspective could be precisely what you need to enhance your problem-solving abilities. After all, two heads are better than one.