Wise words from one of my favorite bands (Rage Against the Machine), “know your enemy”. In marketing, you are competing with other companies, and even industries (look at how movie theaters compete against DVD, and television) for scarce money. In order to succeed, you need to arm yourself with all the knowledge you can about your competition. You need to know their strengths, weaknesses and strategies, so that you can develop your plan to defeat them. Great, so you already knew that. But how do you go about obtaining this information? Here are some quick tips for you…

1. List your direct and indirect competitors. How are you going to learn about your competition if you don’t even know who they are? As one of my old mentors (and good friend, you know who you are) would say, “make a list”. Don’t forget to include both direct (companies that provide similar products or services to yours) and indirect competitors (companies that provide products or services different from your own that satisfy the same need).

2. Pay them a visit. After you have your list, you should visit your competitors website and learn what you can. Not only will you learn about their products and / or services, you will also learn how they are marketing themselves, what they think of their own brand, and you will be able to get an idea of which type of customers they are targeting. You can also learn about their history, and the officers of the company. If there is a trade show, visit them and find out all you can. If they have a store, go in and patronize them. Find out what you can up close and in person. It’s important to do this early so that you will get a fresh impression of what type of business they run.

3. Dig a little deeper. Visit www.hoovers.com and check out their financials. If they are a publicly traded company, then there are tons of sources to go to get additional information. Go to www.dnb.com and check out a credit report. Remember those officers you learned about in the previous step? Google them and find out more about them. This will let you know a little bit more about how decisions are made at this company.

4. Set a date to follow-up. Like all marketing, competitive analysis is a process not a project (we’ll probably discuss this in detail in a future post). This means that you need to set up a follow-up date in your calendar so that you can go through the process again, and find out what’s changed. If you’re dealing with professionals, then your competition is looking at you just like you’re looking at them, and they’ll react to whatever strategy you’ve chosen to take them down. Do yourself a favor and stay vigilant.

Once you know all about your competition, you can use this information to find out what you can do better or differently than them. Develop your strategy and watch the competition suffer. We’ll talk more about how to take these suckers out in the future.

Hey, I’m not an expert on competitive analysis, so if any of you readers have anything to share, let me know in the comments, or email me at edwardviator@evil-marketer.com

I’ve been saying it for years, and will probably say it again… People vote with thier wallets. Check out this link for an example. Remember my post “marketing is a game, and money is how we keep score.” That is exactly why descisions are made in business. If it makes money, doesn’t damage your brand, and isn’t illegal, then the answer is yes. It’s not complicated.

Let’s face it, people like to complain (myself included). Let’s take my favorite punching bag, video game Modern Warfare 2. Click on the title to go to a message board where you’ll probably see about 80% of the posts are complaints of some sort (10% bragging, 5% nonsense, 5% legitimate posts or quesitons). And yet, the game sold millions. They are even releasing some new downloadable content soon (or maybe they already did), and again it will make the publisher, Activision, alot of money. But everyone seems to hate the game.

So let me ask you, does this mean that Activision will stop releasing Call of Duty games? Does it mean that they will completely change the next installment? Of course not. If it ain’t broke, why fix it. And raking in a billion dollars in sales means that it aint broke (in business terms). While you need to focus on areas of improvement, and you definitely need to create a good product, don’t focus too much on the haters. Likewise, you shouldn’t only focus on money either, but that’s another story.