Are your products circling to the bottom?
Have you noticed that a company comes out with a great new product or a musician has a smash hit album, and their customers love it?
Then their competitors start the race to copy what they have done? This copying may explain the number of music clones around at the moment and why Apple is between a rock and a hard place.
The trouble is with this plagiarism becomes the industry standard very quickly, and the reduced impact on the then delighted customer. They shrug their shoulders and get on with it.
So then, the company with the original idea has a set of customers with even higher expectations and thus have to innovate to keep up.
Competitive Intelligence helps companies like this to jump three steps ahead of the competition, isolate weaknesses in current offerings and predict what is going to happen in the future.
Also, have you noticed we do this ourselves.
This is from an interesting article entitled “The surprising truth about why we tend to imitate others” by Michael Yarbrough.
Have you ever noticed how synchronized your reactions are with the person you talk to? A common human behavior classified as “mirroring” has been known and studied by psychologists for a long time.
We all tend to mimic gestures of people we like and we do it subconsciously. But why do we act like this? Is there any special reason for that?
As a rule, mirroring means that interlocutors enjoy their communication. There’s a certain level of agreement between them. The topic of discussion is equally interesting for both people and they know that their interests meet.
A historical explanation
Tuning your own mood and actions to others can be traced back to human origins. People used mirroring as a kind of universal signal. In order to survive and evolve, humankind had to learn and invent many things including socially accepted behavior.
There were stronger, smarter and more honored individuals in the human society. These were the ones with a higher social status. All the others had to develop certain behavioral patterns to show their respect and honor to the strongest. For example, if such an honored man wore a handkerchief as a decorative accessory, the rest of the group would consider it to be trendy and an absolute must for them to wear too.
About Octopus Intelligence
Octopus is a global Intelligence service company. Answering the questions to help you grow.
We help brands and investors like yourself reimagine how you can beat your competitors, make more money, be disruptive, and enter new markets. Enabling you to grow faster with more certainty with Competitive Intelligence, Due Diligence and good old common sense. We live in an increasingly uncertain, competitive and ever-shifting world. What you need is active real-world strategy. Where deep expertise combines with Competitive Intelligence based actions. To answer the what and the how, for the now and the next.
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