Caboose Cut Loose

The first thing to know when in business, is who you are competitors are. This concept may seem rather obvious, but I recently did some consulting with a recruitment service. Without saying too much about her business structure, the idea was it was a low cost alternative to big-name recruiters, saving money by providing ads and short-listing candidates. I asked the director “Who are your competitors?”. She rattled off the company off whom she took her business model, before reciting the top 5 multi-million-dollar recruiting agencies in town.

Well…

• The exact same business  model - yes.
• The leading recruitment agencies in the nation - well yeah… okay… I’ll pay that. You can try and swipe a few of their clients - but the majority of their big clients are multi-million dollar businesses themselves, needing recruitment services on a scale that this new business model could not possibly provide.

Interestingly, she failed to mention the biggest competitor of all - Seek.com, Career One, the local rag, and anywhere else a business owner can publish their own ads, sift through applicants, and then hire their own employees. If all these small businesses are currently doing their own recruiting “successfully” - you need to give them the reason to change.

So who are your competitors? Say you are releasing a new brand of breakfast muesli - Who are your competitors? Kellogs? Sanitarium? The local homemade brand up the street? Sure… but what about toast? What about liquid breakfast alternatives? How about “Con” the Fruit man up the road? What about coffee?

Think about your competitors. Use your peripheral vision, and work out your primary, secondary and tertiary competitors. Understand exactly who they are, what they are doing, and why your product is better, then work our your marketing strategy to target your new audience accordingly.

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