Can’t We Just Be Frienemies?

There’s something that’s been bugging me for a while now. It’s our attitudes towards competition. I think most people have a very immature attitude towards competition.

Competition is a good thing. Actually competition is a great thing. But the problem is people think of competition in terms of absolutes and winner takes all, when the fact is, in business, absolutes don’t exist in competition anymore. I regularly run across startups who think that they don’t have any competition because no one does exactly what they do or I run into the opposite, where they view big companies as their competitor because they have one product that provides some of the same functionality as their product.

As I’m prone to do from time to time let’s start with a few definitions:

Who is your competitor? The simple answer is:

Any product or service that a potential customer would spend their money on instead of your product or service.

Seems black or white right? Let’s look at an example. The various tech examples are too easy  and in all cases involve several of my clients so lets look more broadly so I can be objective.

Who does Dr Pepper compete with? Dr Pepper is in the cola, soft drink category. So they compete with Coke and Pepsi. But Dr Pepper is owned by Schweppes which also owns RC Cola, another competitor in the category. But when was the last time you had to decide between Dr Pepper or RC Cola?

So let’s look at the Coke and Pepsi side of things. Dr Pepper is a 3rd alternative in the main cola wars. Dr Pepper does a really good job of staying out of the main battle. So well in fact that they are able to ride the massive infrastructures these two cola giants have set up.

In many areas of the country Dr Pepper is actually bottled by Coke and then distributed by Pepsi.  This allows them to achieve the efficiencies of scale that Coke and Pepsi enjoy in both cost of bottling and distribution but without the expense of setting up and running such complicated systems.

What if Dr Pepper  took a winner takes all, absolute view of competition? They would have refused to partner with Coke or Pepsi. They’d be RC Cola right now.

To bring it closer home, many of my good friends who I’ve known for years work at other agencies. They’re “the competition.” They’re still my friends.

Many of our clients work with multiple agencies and we have to work with them to do the right thing for our clients, if we let “competition” get in our way we’d do crappy work that would make us and our client look bad.Being competitors doesn’t mean you have to be contentious.

Competition doesn’t mean you’re enemies it just means you have someone to push you and make you do better.

Be better, don’t be contentious.