Competititon is good

Jun 01, 2006

Cross-posted at Writing Cave . Seth Godin shares an interesting thought in his blog post titled fiddleheads . Although I have no clue what “fiddleheads” are (OK, I just need to google the term, I know), I totally agree that competition is good for almost every business, and I don’t mean in the holistic sense.

Apart from the fact that competition motivates us to improve and innovate and hence acts as a big, never ending incentive, there is another aspect of it that very few people explore: the awareness and validity factor. Let’s suppose you come out with a product that only you are selling. No matter how pioneering your fete is, unless there is large scale awareness about your product, you are not going to be able to sell it without a huge marketing budget. In your marketing efforts, you’ll not only have to explain how your product benefits the buyer, you’ll also need to make the prospective buyer aware of the need if he or she is oblivious to it. Take for example air purifiers. Here we can very easily apply the boiled frog analogy and assume that very few people are going to buy your unique air-purifiers because very few people realize — due to the slow effect — what a havoc the air-pollution is wreaking on us and our children.

But what if 5-6 other companies are selling the air-purifiers? People will take notice; they’ll think: OK, lots of people must be buying them, that’s why so many companies are selling them.

I think healthy competition should always be encouraged, and only those companies and individuals are wary of competition who don’t want to work hard on their products and services.