Not real ones, and for reasons I’ve explained before and can quickly sum up by saying… no one does what I do in quite the way I do it, so how can anyone compete with me?

But early this week I was in London, presenting a couple of slots at Chris Cardell’s Internet Marketing Mastery seminar (and if you were there, then I hope you enjoyed it all as much as I did).

Anyway, in the breaks I got loads and loads of questions thrown at me.

Nothing new there.

But you know what really surprised me?

The number of people who were more worried about what their competitors were doing rather than what they could be doing.

What?

Your competitors can go and eat donkey-knobs for all you care!

Why?

I’ll tell you:

1. You can’t control what they do. So worrying about it is just a quick way to a whole lot of stress and worry.
2. Most of them are clueless. By following them, you’re like the circle of caterpillars endlessly walking around the plant-pot playing follow-my-leader, until they all die (clue: whom do you think your competitors are looking at and following? Yeah, the very people who are following them. That’s you).
3. By focusing on them you’re not focusing on you. You become reactive instead of active.

Doing things the other way is all part of your positioning strategy. Being different from your competitors can be tough, as anyone who was in any way ‘different’ at school can tell you.

Short, tall, fat, thin, with glasses a lisp or any other characteristic to make you a target, you know what it can be like.

But bugger that — you’re all grown up now, so what do you care what your erstwhile competitors snigger about behind their hands.

By all means watch the successful people in your industry and see if you can divine what makes them successful and how you can adapt it to your own circumstances.

But follow them blindly and let their ill-informed opinions dictate your marketing strategy?

Pah.

To the Devil with that one.

Everyone’s got opinions about how you should run your marketing; but, alas, when it comes to marketing, most of them are like schoolboys talking about sex: enthusiasm and ignorance in equal measure.

Business Supremacy this month is 12 pages of tightly packed strategies, tips, tools and techniques aimed at making YOU King of your own particular hill (and as one member, Sanjay, said on the discussion group:

“There was a LOT of content in 24 pages of gold (Each page was really 2 pages and Jon managed to gracefully compress it, so don’t go complaining you only got 12 pages)”).

http://www.BusinessSupremacy.ie

Join me or don’t join me… but if for some unfathomable reason you don’t, then at least take this tip from me: forget your competitors.

Forget they even exist.

Because as far as a properly positioned business is concerned, they don’t.

Tagged as: irish business, marketing, positioning, premium pricing, small business marketing