Understand your competitors

Who are your competitors?

All businesses face competition. Even if you're the only restaurant in town you must compete with cinemas, bars and other businesses where your customers will spend their money instead of with you. With increased use of the internet to buy goods and services and to find places to go, you are no longer just competing with your immediate neighbours. Indeed, you could find yourself competing with businesses from other countries.

Your competitor could be a new business offering a substitute or similar product that makes your own redundant.

Competition is not just another business that might take money away from you. It can be another product or service that's being developed and which you ought to be selling or looking to license before somebody else takes it up.

And don't just research what's already out there. You also need to be constantly on the lookout for possible new competition.

You can get clues to the existence of competitors from:

• local business directories
• your local Chamber of Commerce
• advertising
• press reports
• exhibitions and trade fairs
• questionnaires
• searching on the internet for similar products or services
• information provided by customers
• flyers and marketing literature that have been sent to you - quite common if you're on a bought-in marketing list
• searching for existing patented products that are similar to yours
• planning applications and building work in progress

Subjects covered in this guide

• Introduction
• Who are your competitors?
• What you need to know about your competitors
• Learning about your competitors
• Hearing about your competitors
• How to act on the competitor information you get

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