Stop Copying Your Competitors
Businesses naturally pay attention to their competitors.
New websites appear, services evolve, advertising becomes more visible and branding changes over time. Keeping an eye on what's happening elsewhere in the market is perfectly sensible, but it's surprisingly easy for curiosity to become imitation. Decisions start being influenced by what other businesses are doing rather than what the business itself actually needs.
The difficulty is that those decisions rarely come with any context. A redesigned website might be the result of declining enquiries, a new service could be filling a gap left by falling demand elsewhere and an increase in advertising spend may simply reflect pressure to replace lost revenue. From the outside, none of that is visible. All that's visible is the decision itself, yet that's often enough for other businesses to start questioning whether they should be doing exactly the same thing.
Why did your competitor change their website?
The honest answer is that you'll probably never know.
The decision may have followed months of declining enquiries. Customers may have been struggling to understand what the business actually offered. Internal discussions could have highlighted weaknesses that weren't obvious to anyone outside the organisation. Equally, the website may have been performing perfectly well and the redesign was simply part of a wider rebrand. Without sitting in those meetings, it's impossible to know.
The same applies to almost every visible business decision. A new service might be responding to changing customer demand. Increased advertising spend could be replacing lost revenue. Even a rebrand can be driven by dozens of different commercial factors that never become public. Businesses only ever see the outcome, yet those decisions are often treated as evidence that they've discovered the 'right' way of doing things.
That's where assumptions start replacing evidence. A competitor's decision becomes the justification for making one of your own, despite the fact that the two businesses may be facing completely different challenges, serving different customers and working towards entirely different objectives.
Don’t ignore them though…
None of this means competitors should be ignored. Quite the opposite.
Understanding the market is an important part of running any successful business. Competitors often spot opportunities, identify changing customer expectations and introduce genuinely good ideas. Paying attention to those developments can be extremely valuable.
The mistake is assuming that the visible decision is the lesson.
A competitor's new website doesn't automatically mean your own website needs replacing. A new service doesn't necessarily signal a gap in your offering and increased advertising spend isn't proof that you should be investing more in Google Ads or social media.
Those decisions should prompt questions rather than provide answers. Before making similar changes, it's worth understanding whether the same problem actually exists within your own business.
Only then does it become possible to decide whether following a similar path genuinely makes commercial sense or whether you're simply reacting to somebody else's circumstances.
It's particularly common with newer businesses. Looking at established competitors can be useful, but trying to build a business by following their blueprint rarely ends well. Established businesses have years of experience, reputation and customer trust behind them. Competing on exactly the same terms is an uphill battle. Understanding what makes your own business different is usually a much stronger foundation for long-term growth.
“Should we be doing that?”
A client notices a competitor has launched a new website. Another has become more active on LinkedIn. Somebody else has started investing in Google Ads or introducing new services. The question is almost always the same.
"Should we be doing that as well?"
Sometimes the answer is yes, but more often the discussion moves somewhere else entirely.
Is the current website actually preventing customers from making an enquiry? Has demand for existing services changed? Are opportunities being lost because enquiries aren't being followed up quickly enough? Do prospective customers understand what makes the business different in the first place?
They're far more useful questions because they focus on evidence rather than assumption. If the answers point towards investing in a new website, introducing another service or increasing advertising spend, those decisions are being made for the right reasons. If they don't, copying a competitor simply creates activity without necessarily creating progress.
One size does NOT fit all.
Every business is different. Customers behave differently, markets evolve at different speeds and commercial priorities change over time. Two businesses operating in the same sector can be facing completely different challenges despite appearing remarkably similar from the outside.
That's why the most successful businesses rarely build their strategy around keeping pace with competitors. They understand their market, pay attention to changing trends and remain aware of what others are doing, but the decisions they make are driven by their own objectives, their own customers and the evidence in front of them.
Competitors can highlight opportunities you'd otherwise miss. They can expose changing customer expectations and occasionally confirm that an idea you've already been considering has real merit. What they can't do is provide the context needed to make important commercial decisions on your behalf.
That's why copying competitors is rarely the right answer. Understanding why your own business needs to change is far more valuable than trying to work out why somebody else's already has.
The businesses that consistently make good decisions aren't the ones reacting to every new website, service launch or advertising campaign. They're the ones that understand why they're making those decisions in the first place. The answer to that question is almost always far more valuable.
