Competition has two faces- a good face and a bad face. Good side of the competition always tends to favour customers while the bad side of it makes sellers to struggle earn decent amount of profit.
Businessmen are crying ever since new players have jumped into the race of serving customers all over world. The reason behind their shedding of tears 😢 is the fact profit margins they used to earn have shrinked. If they would earn 30 percent profit on a particular product that time, they hardly make 10 percent now and it all happened as a result of growing competition.
Someone has wisely said that the power has shifted from businessmen to customers ever since competition introduced itself into the market. Businessmen had the power of controlling demand and supply of products and services in our societies, however, it no longer works anymore because customer has become a king. Customers decide who to buy from and they choose the one who serves them in the best way possible. When people get choices, it is they who control your fate and when they are left with no choice, it is you who dictates them but unfortunately this system has dissapeard and competition is the culprit that has made it so in our communities.
Now, we can’t reverse the situation that we are trapped in today, however, startups can leverage some actionable and beneficial strategies that would help them survive all the odds thrown by competition.
One of the best actions startup owners can take to cope with competition is differentiation. Differentiation is nothing but a way to make your offer whether a product or service be distinct and different from your rivals. It is not always the case that you would introduce your product to customers in a complete different way, no, rather, it may be adding one or two unique features in your products but they must incite the purchasing behavior in the minds of customers. Say for example, you are selling a water bottle 🍶 and there are ten other businesses selling the same product, you should ask yourself a simple question and that is why would customers buy from you and not from your competitors. You need to add something different to your water bottles so that customers prefer you over others. Say, for example, you may add LED reminder in your water bottle in a way that it helps customers drink water on the time.
Your added feature could also be making your product reusable for other functions other than serving one particular purpose. Likewise, you can think of a lot of features that would differentiate your products from competitors and the only sacrifice other than investment is your brain cells that would help you come up with a unique feature or features for your products.
Even service based startups can excercise differentiation model to stand the challenges thrown by the competition. Say, for example, you own a web development services business, you could differentiate by adding AI chatbots to the websites of your customers. You can think of hundreds of ways out to make your business distinct from others who deliver the same services.
Deliver an exceptional customer service otherwise you may loose your loyal customer base as well. Exceptional customer services 👏 always brings you benefits though it may drain some of the costs from your pocket.
Loyalty of customers isn’t always thrived by your good products or services. Customers become diehard fans of your business when you treat them on a timely basis and you keep up with your promises. The moment you show some delays in your promise, customers prefer switching to your rivals and that you know is a big loss to your business. Customer delight should be your priority over customer satisfaction as it doesn’t work anymore. Customer delight takes more care of customer expectations than they deserve and when you go beyond serving the expectations of your customers, they become loyal who never think of any other business other than you.
