What helps businesses compete, really?
There are always leaders and catch-ups in the market. How so?
What helps leaders hold their positions and prevent newcomers from getting ahead?
How come a young startup can come along and disrupt the market of established companies, changing the game completely?
Let’s discuss.
There are several reasons for this:
What do these reasons have in common? They are based on the availability of knowledge and information possessed by the leaders or fast-growing newcomers.
Let’s illustrate.
?? McDonald's and Burger King have long competed for leadership in the fast food market. They offer similar products, but McDonald's has traditionally dominated the market.
Burger King's unexpected move
In 1974, Burger King launched the ‘Have it Your Way ’ ad campaign, which allowed customers to personalise their orders by adding or omitting ingredients as they wished. This was a significant difference from McDonald's approach, where menus were more fixed.
Results
This campaign was successful and helped Burger King to attract more customers by emphasising their focus on individual consumer preferences. In response, McDonald's also began to introduce order personalisation options to remain competitive.
Burger King got the intel about a market need (the desire to customise orders) before McDonald's did. Which allowed them to gain a market advantage and strengthen their position.
If information is so important, then businesses need to learn how to obtain it faster than their competitors, or at least not slower.
But before we learn how to obtain information, let's discuss the types of information out there - this affects the way we get it:
Trends.
They affect consumer attention, change the way we do business, and more. For example, the sharing economy trend which has spawned companies like Uber and Airbnb.
Unmet Consumer Needs.
Something that customers need but the market has not yet offered a way to satisfy this need. The users’ desire to purchase goods from the comfort of their own home is an example of an unmet need. A response was the emergence of a huge number of online shops that fulfilled it. Those who discovered this need earlier were able to gain an advantage, e.g. the launch of online commerce helped Amazon at the start of their business.
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Product Problems.
Something in your product that prevents users from using it conveniently and effectively. For example, people don't like to enter too much personal information at registration, they don't understand why they need to do it, and are concerned about privacy issues. Companies that abandon complex registrations with a large number of fields in favour of simpler ones get an influx of additional users, thus gaining additional market share.
So how do look for this kind of information? It's simple, you need to?research.?Obtaining new information should become one of the?important?processes of your business.
Make a habit of following trends.
Subscribe to major blogs, news resources in your segment and the tech world in general, i.e. https://www.theverge.com/?or?https://www.wired.com/. Stay up to date with the latest news.
Communicate with consumers.
How can you learn about problems in the market, or with your product if you stay in the office and communicate within your bubble? You need to set up processes to get new information on a regular basis.
Fortunately there is a multitude of companies, services and products that allow you to do this, we are one of them. Validate product and marketing decisions with our solutions that cover the entire product cycle span. Learn more at Fastuna.com
Next time we will talk about how to effectively set up processes to regularly collect information about your current and potential customers.
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