Copying Means You’re Always 1 Step Behind
You close a competitor's website and feel worse than when you opened it. The first in our Confidence Killers series explores how competitor comparison quietly changes your business
This week we’re starting something new. The Confidence Killers is a series about the quiet things that take confidence out of a business. The first one is the most common of the lot: checking what your competitors are doing, and letting it change what you do.
You close a competitor’s website and feel worse than when you opened it.
It’s a flat, deflated sort of feeling. Decisions you settled months ago suddenly have a question mark next to them, and you can’t work out where it came from.
And it’s not something you’d admit to anyone. You’ve run a real business for years and paid people through quiet months, and here you are feeling small over a stranger’s homepage.
Twenty Minutes on Their Website
There was no question in your head when you clicked. The admin could wait, and you typed the address without really deciding to, same as last week and the week before.
Their team page has more faces than yours. Their case studies are better written, and you’d know, because you’ve read your own a hundred times. Then you notice they’ve started offering the thing you’ve been thinking about for eighteen months.
You close the tab and get on with the afternoon. It feels like nothing happened.
Next time you price a job, the number comes out lower than it would have last month. If anyone asked, you’d say something about the market. Then you soften a line in the proposal that you used to say plainly, because suddenly you’re not sure you’ve earned it.
None of it feels like copying. It feels like being sensible, which is why it’s so hard to catch.
Keep that up for a year, one small edit at a time, and nobody has beaten you. You’ve just rewritten yourself into a slightly worse version of them.
Research Has a Question Attached
Some competitor research is useful. If you want to know what they charge for a job, look it up and close the tab. That’s market awareness, and you should have it.
The damage happens when you go in without a question, and that usually means there’s nothing of your own to measure against. A business that has never written down who it’s for and what it does differently will borrow a benchmark from somewhere, and the nearest one is a competitor’s website.
Write your own down and the pull goes. You can open their site, see what they’re doing, and close it again with your price exactly where it was, because you’re checking against your own standard.
When your brand makes it clear what you stand for, you stop needing to check what everyone else is doing.
We’ve had to hold our own nerve on this too. The Real Biz Life Chronicles grew for a long time without a website. We know what the temptation looks like from the inside, because every agency watches what other agencies are doing, and there is always a version of the argument that says just get something up, they have all got one. The move came once the show had earned it, and the brand was built to match what it had become by then. That is the same call we ask our clients to make.
Not sure where your brand is solid and where it’s leaving you guessing? Our Brand Health Check is a quick, fillable PDF that shows you both.
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Get ready to learn exactly what it takes to grow with distinction and show mediocrity the middle finger. In this podcast Tracy interviews authentic business owners who share their story of building a successful business, their strategies behind their success and what it means to lead the way.
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About DSP
Design Studio Perth is an integrated branding and graphic design agency based in Perth, Western Australia.
Our team is made up of dedicated professionals who work closely with each client to develop unique and compelling brands that resonate with their target audience.
Our team is made up of dedicated professionals who work closely with each client to develop unique and compelling brands that resonate with their target audience.
