Benchmarking and Competition – Immortal Branding Sn 01. Ep. 06

It’s not enough to build your brand. Every market is crowded with wanna-be entrepreneurs vying for the same customers you’re after. Today, you need to start benchmarking your industry and competition to break-free from the pack. Let’s look at how to differentiate your brand from the masses.

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Benchmarking is about finding and learning excellence from industry standard bearers. Is your brand built on best practices or are you making things up as you go? If you feel like you’re constantly inventing the wheel everyday, you need to start benchmarking.

Out-Compete: Benchmarking for Industry Best Practice

First, start with the brands you love. Second, look at your would-be competition to discover what they do well. Look at what each of these groups do well repeatedly. The keyword here is repeatedly. Doing something once and getting a big splash is not a best practice. There’s no evidence to support that it will work again in a different environment or circumstance.
A best practice will be repeatable and yield similar or better results, regardless of who is doing the implementation. Your business will accelerate its momentum the more benchmark practices you can adopt for your brand.
However, this form of benchmarking is only about getting you table stakes. If your business is in a mature market, this brings your brand on par with developed firms. If the competitors in your market lack the benchmarking discipline, this will enable you to out-compete them.

Out-Innovate: Benchmarking to beat the Competition

Benchmarking for innovation is the next-level. Innovation is always found in the intersection of different disciplines. For this reason, you must look for innovative practices in industries others than your own.
If you’re creating a luxury product or experience, look at other luxury brands. Conversely, if you’re building for scale and high-volume, consider brands that do that well. Benchmarking their methodology will provide you with the insights to create parallel practices in your own brand.
Innovation is the soul of brand differentiation. Don’t stop at best practices that make you the same as everyone else. Standout from the crowd. Different is better than better.

Outsmart: Becoming the Benchmark for Your Competition

Once you understand benchmarking and competition,  you can incorporate industry best and innovative practices into your brand and customer fulfillment. Don’t stop here. There are other horizons and other worlds to conquer. Look beyond your current market to unsolved customer problems.
The market of unsolved customer problems is always the entrepreneur’s goldmine. This is better known as the blue ocean strategy for competing. Blue ocean strategies allow you to move into markets where the competition is low or nonexistent. You will be able to set the best practices for your market. In doing so, you become the benchmark—the industry standard bearer. Ultimately, this is the market position every business seeks dominate.
Now, you can spend all of your resources competing against entrenched competition. Or, you can spend the same resources growing the market and making money solving the unsolved customer problems.  By the time your competitors figure how to match you, you’ll have a brand leadership position in domain expertise, an revenue generation, and market share. Now, your competition will have to expend considerable resources chasing your taillights.

Benchmarking and Competition: The Science of Winning

This is “the what” of benchmarking and competition. What comes next is “the how.” That’s where Branding MADEGRANDBYCAM comes in. Our branding folio brings two decades of winning excellence to bear on your business to help you out-compete, out-innovate, and outsmart your competitors. We will help you apply the science of winning to take your brand to the next horizon. Let’s work!

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