Business is War
By Jerry Rackley
To Carl von Clausewitz we owe the maxim, “Business is war.” Clausewitz, a 19th century Prussian solider and military theorist was not, as far as I know, a man of business. But he understood that the competitive forces were similar, whether encountered in war or business.
It’s easy to think that we don’t have any real competition if we’re in a big market with just a few, well-behaved competitors that rarely bump into each other. If you think this, a rude awakening is probably in your future as we just learned.
There is always competition, beginning with the Status Quo. That prospective client that chooses to just keep doing what they’ve been doing and not do business with you essentially puts you in competition with their Status Quo. Many companies don’t recognize the Status Quo as a competitor, but it is often the biggest one you have.
If you’re with a company that is having success, then you’re going to have more traditional competition. You may not have it yet, but you will, because nothing attracts the attention of competitors like success. Those competitors don’t always play fair. We naïvely believe that business competition is largely civil, and then when it isn’t, we are shocked and indignant, but also highly motivated.
We’ve had a recent brush with the competition here at Demand Metric. Another company set it self up in business selling marketing tools and templates via subscription. While we don’t have exclusive rights to our business model, we do take offense when someone downloads our templates, rebrands them and begins to compete with us using our materials and business model. The effect this incident is having on us is worth sharing.
First, it is sobering. Since Demand Metric was founded, we’ve always felt like that small, energetic startup that worked hard for recognition and every dollar of revenue. Suddenly, we realize that we’ve been successful enough that someone wants to steal our playbook. They’re not even trying to do it better than we are; they’re just putting a different cover on our book. The ease with which someone can do this is unnerving; as is the audacity it takes to do it. Who else might do this to us? What other potential competitors are out there lurking, seeking to steal food out of our children’s mouths?
Next, it is exciting. Why would someone try to steal from us unless we had something worth stealing? In a strange way, that this has happened provides validation to our business plan and efforts. I think this is a rite of passage for a company. We now must consider ourselves a grown-up company and not a startup anymore.
Regardless of the emotions, competitive incidents like this cause lots of healthy introspection about from where our value really comes. While our tools and templates are helpful, our members don’t just want a set of tools, but access to the expertise distilled into them. It’s helpful to have a tool for doing positioning, but it is more valuable to confer with a positioning expert when you need one. We’ll continue to publish quality tools and offer our members the intellectual capital that goes into them.
Finally, this incident also reinforces the need for vigilance. Don’t assume you’re not a target just because you haven’t been yet or lately. The wiliest competitors never attack when you’re looking. Keep your eye on them and constantly update your intelligence. We never thought we needed to use our own Competitor Analysis Tool, until now.
