The competitors are clustered, copying one another, slowly drifting to where the customer is. Don’t add yourself to the fray by copying what they do. By the time you catch up, they will be elsewhere.

Instead, do a better job at figuring out where customers really are, and chase them instead.

Download a printable PDF of this graphic to post in the hallway.

Posted by Philip Haine on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 12:46 pm.
See similar articles in: Commentary, Product Vision & Strategy, Strategy.

3 Responses to “Chase customers, not competitors”

1. davidc wrote on December 28th, 2007 at 7:44 am :

   Reminds me of my favorite quote from the book “Good to Great” on competition:

   If you had the opportunity to sit down and read all 2000+ pages of the transcripts from the Good to Great interviews, you’d be struck by the utter absence of talk about “competitive strategy.” Yes, they did talk about strategy, and they did talk about performance; they did talk about becoming the best, and they even talked about winning. But they never talked in reactionary terms and never defined their strategies principally in response to what others were doing. They talked in terms of what they were trying to create, and how they were trying to improve relative to an absolute standard of excellence.

   Ironically it was an email with this quote as the anchor of my argument that put a rift between me and the PMs on my last team at a large company and eventually soured me enough to leave.

2. The Blueprint Blog » Chase customers, not competitors wrote on July 30th, 2008 at 9:48 pm :

   [...] Peter Haine Tagged: [...]

3. Philip Haine wrote on August 27th, 2008 at 10:34 pm :

   That’s Philip Haine (not Peter), but I’ll take the link, thanks.

   (I cannot register an account nor find the email address of the owner of this blog. The only way I can communicate is using a trackback!)

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