As I’ve been thinking about how to respond to some recent competitive noise in the marketplace I’ve had some interesting internal discussions that I thought might be worth sharing. I’ll take you through our thinking and let you know where we netted out. In our situation some of the claims about our business were flat out untrue, others were stretching the truth.
My first reaction was to take the high road – stick to our guns and maintain our value positioning. Play to our strength as an industry leader. Then when I reviewed our competitive response I started to have second thoughts. Quite frankly, it seemed a little weak. My personal competitive streak was perking up. Could I really just sit by and let these “untruths” sit in the market while we continued focusing on our core value proposition.
I had the team take a second pass at the positioning, dialing it up a bit. At about the same time we received a call from a client who was considering leaving us. We quickly set up a meeting to save the account. During the meeting we found ourselves defending our company against the competitive claims that started this discussion. After taking our client through a point-by-point response (and saving the account) I decided to direct the team to dial up the competitive response even further. I couldn’t sit back any longer.
Reading the third pass at our competitive response I felt like we aggressively (and fairly) refuted all ill-founded claims. Then I slept on it. Before updating our communications vehicles with the new messaging I pulled the team together. I just couldn’t bring myself to proceed in a tit-for-tat response with the competition. It was playing down to them. Successful companies race forward, they don’t glance back in the rear view mirror – that’s when they can lose a step. Who knows how it will play out in the market. In the meantime I think it was healthy for the team to go through the gyrations that we did. We’re now all internally aligned and sprinting forward. For me, staying out of the mud and sticking to our core value proposition is the path that feels right.
