Jim Rohn famously said "you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with". In practical terms what this means is make sure you spend your days with people who reflect the kind of person you want to be.
When Mike Smith took over the reins at ANZ in 2007 he declared his intentions to change the direction of ANZ, giving it an Asian-centric focus. This was he claimed, because being the ‘largest of the big four [banks in Australia] is like being the tallest of the seven dwarves’. Sound familiar?
In all my years, I’ve found it exceedingly rare to have a friend, client or boss who sets out to be ordinary. I’m very sure I live in an ambitious bubble but few people, it seems, have their sights set on a solid pass grade for anything it is they do. ‘Sales are skyrocketing. We need a campaign that will really slow things down a bit’. Said no creative brief, ever. ‘We saw this clever campaign / great user experience / interesting use of VR and we’d like one of those’, however… well, I’d love to say it was uncommon.
Keeping up with the Joneses (or the Kardashians, or the Ubers) is so hardwired into us that it’s almost impossible not to do. In a 2005 study, researchers found that primates would prefer to look at photos of the most popular primate in the group rather than have their favourite sugary drink. That’s right. You think sugar is a problem? Turns out celebrity is just as addictive.
To be fair, I can appreciate the attraction. In this ever-shifting marketplace it’s fairly comforting to do what someone has already proven works. And you’re unlikely to get fired for being better than your competitors, even if only incrementally.
So it seems unsurprising that one of the most-requested components of any project that I see come through our shop is the “competitor landscape review”. But it’s time to stop, and here’s how we’re going to change.
The challenge is that consumer expectations are oftentimes not being set by competitors. They’re being set by the best of the best. If a hotel chain routinely responds to my Facebook messages within minutes, you think I’m going to be OK with the six hour (day?) turnaround of my utility provider? If my favourite makeup store can send me foundation samples that match my skin tone exactly, you think I’ll be impressed that my airline reckons personalisation means using my first name in an email?
Now let’s say we’re working for a clothing retailer. They compete on spectacular customer service and a niche but high-quality product inventory. They have the target of quadrupling revenue in the next three years and believe they need to overhaul their business to be more digitally-focused and capitalise on emerging technology and behavioural trends in order to do so. They’ve witnessed the exponential growth of online shopping so have decided their website is the first place to start.
Enter the competitor landscape review, and the beginning of mediocrity. Instead of comparing our brand to its neighbours however, I propose a different landscape review; one anchored in comparison of peers in profile and positioning, not proximity. In this instance, rather than spend time benchmarking our brand against other retailers who may or may not compete on similar variables, I propose we look to the global marketplace for examples of organisations that are outstandingly excellent at delivering on a similar positioning and then articulate the elements involved in that success.
In this case, we might say that an outstanding example of ‘spectacular customer service’ in practice is Apple. The next step in this process is to break down what it is that makes up that experience of spectacular customer service. In this case we might say it’s three things: an extensive online knowledge repository allowing people to troubleshoot on their own time, the Genius Bar which allows people one-on-one time with an expert by appointment, and a closed-loop experience that enables seamless use of Apple products as a family.
These elements then become three things which our retailer can be benchmarked against. Across a range of “profile peers” or “positioning peers” we then start to construct a genuine sense of our place in the world and are on the way to identifying legitimate opportunities that are both proven and have the ability to change our business and reset the benchmark for our industry. Rather than comparing our retailer to the industry stalwarts, the industry darling-of-the-moment and perhaps an Insta-led startup, we’ve now got something far more practical to play with.
I’m not for a second saying that there’s no value in comparing yourself with competitors. There may even be some which are appropriate in the landscape review process described above. Competitor landscape reviews absolutely have their place, too. They’re an essential part of strategy development when it comes to determining how and where you’re going to compete as an organisation (for example).
When it comes to the execution however, the fact is that whether your targets are as aggressive as the quadrupling revenue in my example or somewhat more modest, our societal and economic landscape is shifting with such assertion that now is not the time for continually comparing ourselves to the rest of the industry.
Is it a perfect plan? No. But is it considerably better than peering out our blinds and eyeballing the neighbours across the street? Hopefully.
By Isobar executive strategy director, Sam Sterling