When Competition Sells Your Product

It all starts with denial! Denial to acknowledge the changing landscape. Denial to accept the legitimacy of a new product. Denial to recognize young, yet strong competition. Denial to understand customer needs.

Slowly, as a new product starts gaining ground, denial turns into dilemma! Dilemma to either strengthen own product or develop a similar, new product. Dilemma whether to start talking about competition’s flaws in place of own strengths, hence making people aware of competition's product. This also leads to making competitors aware of their flaws and possible pitfalls, alerting them to revisit their strategy/improve their offerings to overcome the same.

This dilemma slowly turns into insecurity as younger competition keeps gaining ground. The insecurity of losing out makes someone's gain look like one’s own loss (which might not be true always). In this state of mind, most organizations decide to get into a similar product space as the younger competition.

This behaviour validates the younger competition's now popular yet nascent product, which establishes a start of playing to their strengths, leaving behind one’s own. Once the new product gets validation by established players, it starts gaining popularity fast and becomes flavour of the season.

Recently, “Zoom” - a comprehensive video conferencing solution, disrupted well-established, but sub-par competition, proving that a better product will work even in a saturated market. 

I witnessed a similar trend during the last year when I joined Chai Point. Our Chai and Filter Coffee brewing machine boxC, went through all aforesaid motions with regard to our strong & established competitors. Misconceptions created in customers’/potential customers’ minds led to enhanced curiosity, hence making a better-informed customer.

In curiosity to know our product better, customers/potential customers started giving us more time to understand our offerings, sharing their doubts (seeded by established players) and started comparing it with existing offerings.

This act of creating misconceptions by established players not only helped us highlight our strengths, but also work on possible pitfalls and improve our offerings.

If this got you curious about boxC, know more on https://bit.ly/2Jn9Dqq.