Perceptual Competition: Threat Or Opportunity?

YOUR TRUE COMPETITORS MIGHT NOT BE WHO YOU THINK THEY ARE.

- Baiju Shah

Identifying your competitors is a more elusive quest than it once was, because comparing your organization with directly related businesses is no longer the whole story.

Exceptional customer experiences raise the bar every day, and we know the consumer makes little distinction between sectors, which is the basis of our thinking on Liquid Expectations, a framework that describes the changing face of competition when customer expectations are fluid across industries. Each time customers see evidence of design and technology that makes their lives easier, they expect to find it everywhere. In a recent Accenture survey, 76 percent of CEOs agreed that they needed to be more proactive in disrupting their own industry. We’ve used our Liquid Expectations model to help hundreds of clients identify who and what they should really have their eye on—and this exercise becomes ever more important as the pace of change continues to accelerate.

Let’s take a moment to explore how we define competition, then we’ll look at what to do about it.

THROUGH THE CUSTOMERS’ EYES 

We looked at the world as customers see it, categorizing competition into three tranches: