Competing in a crowded market

Are you operating in a highly competitive market? Standing out from the crowd is as big a challenge as than ever, in fact many may question whether it is worth competing in a highly saturated market.

Consider when you are in the supermarket looking for a bottle of hair shampoo for the kids, or a healthy cereal alternative to fruit loops. The shelves are packed with competing brands, bright colours and wild claims of a cereal that single handedly changes your son into an iron man or nit shampoos that all get rid of those nasty eggs for good (now we all know that's just not true!).

Understand your competitors
If you are operating in a saturated market the key is to understand your competitors better than they understand themselves, because you need to be different. In order to do that, you need to understand the target market too, understand what it is that the customers want that the competitors are not yet delivering.

For example, in a saturated market

• 5 Hour Energy came up with an innovative product with a cool name in the crowded energy drinks sector - a portable 58ml energy shot with no herbal stimulants that works fast.
• Facebook designed a site that is more user friendly and makes interaction with friends and family much more fun than MySpace and is now becoming an all-encompassing digital entertainment hub.
• Burberry reinvented itself to become the latest hip clothing range for the fashion conscious 20 to 30s, from a very staid 'only for the landed gentry' background.

Be different
All these brands approached a saturated market and won, but it was not an accident. They entered the SAME market with a DIFFERENT approach. To compete in saturated markets you need a unique idea that gives your brand the edge and the courage to approach your brand competition with excitement not dread. If your idea is good enough, it won't matter how much competition you have; in fact competition is ultimately a good thing, it drives innovation and identifies the unmet needs of the market that your brand ultimately needs to address.

Welcome new customers
One of the top goals of any business brand is to enable growth. The key to any business is getting people through the door to view what is behind it, whether it's a real door or a virtual one! Your door not only needs to look inviting, the welcome mat needs to say the right thing. Then to gather potential customers to knock on the door, you need to take an integrated approach to the marketing, effectively aiming the right message at the right audience at the right time in the right place. Once you've done that, your brand need to speak louder, clearer and more specifically than anyone else's. We need to learn from our competitor's successes and downfalls, identifying their points of difference to better understand how to stand apart ourselves.

Remember Dove soap? In 2004 they entered the, some would say, saturated beauty category with their "Campaign for Real Beauty". It challenged society's narrow definition of beauty by showcasing real women with real shapes and of all different sizes. It met a need within the market to acknowledge every woman's quest for beauty, no matter of their shape and size. It honoured women and championed their cause. Within two years of this campaign, the Dove brand beat it's competition to gain $1.2 billion in value and went from a soap bar brand to the beauty brand we now trust.

Brand competition keeps marketers on our toes and brand designers constantly innovating their approach to brand differentiation.