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When we were children, we often learned about the world not only from our parents or guardians and elders, but our peers. This, of course, sometimes had the chance of backfiring. A common refrain would be “if X did something silly, would you follow just because they did?” It seemed that the obvious answer (or at least the correct one to give) was “no”.
Yet in the business world, we often see businesses copying one another’s homework, so to speak. For instance, a new restaurant business in town might look to the highest performing local competitor. Often, this can result in copying and not being unique. If this is a worry, hiring the right manager for the team will help. You can use
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While learning from inspiration and shifting to
the demands of the market
is hardly a good thing, sometimes copying one another, like those exasperated parents once taught us, isn’t a great idea. This is especially true when it comes to marketing. By all means it’s important to check what your competitors are saying and how they’re connected to their audience, but it can also lead to faulty assumptions. Here’s how:
Following Trends Can Obscure Your Identity
If you get into the habit, it’s incredibly easy to lean on
marketing trends
so much that you begin to forget why your business even exists. What were you aiming to offer? Who were you trying to speak to? Why does your specific perspective matter? These are the questions you need to have original answers for, even if they do end up looking similar to other brands.
It’s most noticeable when you see copy-paste branding or messaging across businesses that have nothing to do with each other. For instance, a local bakery using the exact same sleek, sterile tone as a fintech startup, or a law firm leaning into neon colour palettes and quirky mascot branding because it’s what tech startups are doing right now isn’t necessarily going to land.
It doesn’t take long before everything feels disconnected too, especially if you’ve had multiple revisions. That’s not just confusing for your audience, it’s draining for you trying to manage a solid campaign and build a historical brand identity, which does take time. Even if you feel like your industry develops at a rapid pace, you have to know who you are.
Surface-Level Copying Can Easily Miss The Strategy
This happens more than you might think, as a business sees a competitor’s homepage and says “we need that,” without knowing how long it took to build or why it’s laid out that way. If a company replicates another’s email funnel because it looks successful, but it misses the targeting logic, then you may have a joke but with no one for whom that humor is appropriate, so to speak.
If it looks the same that doesn’t mean it functions the same, as you could just bring in leads that don’t convert, or just attract attention without any structure in place to retain it. That’s why seeing what others are doing should be part of the research, but it can’t be
the
research. It’s worth taking the time to step back and ask why a certain piece of content, campaign, or design exists in the first place and if that’s evne connected to your goals.
Marketing consultants
tend to help here, because they can better explain what’s driving the messaging, not just what it looks like on the surface.
What Works For Them Might Never Work For You
This is the hard truth, as sometimes this is down to scale, other times it’s tone, or audience, or expectations. You can copy a pricing model and still drive away loyal customers who don’t respond to change well depending on the development you’ve had.
When Gordon Ramsay took over
the Connaught restaurant
in the early 2000s, most people would have been delighted, but because of the pedigree of the prior fine dining restaurant, many were unhappy and worried about the change. As you can see, even at the highest levels marketing needs to be actionable if you’re going to make a difference.
A change isn’t always a sign of failure, it’s just a reminder that
context matters.
The Most Reliable Voice You Have Is Your Own
That might sound like a bit of a platitude, but it holds up under scrutiny, because what else do you have to offer? If you can’t sell your story, your team, your audience, your goals, what can you sell? It’s the main set of virtues that are entirely yours, and no one else can own that or present it in exactly the same way. That’s why you often see modern firms highlighting their regional differences in an international market, which feels paradoxical, but marketers care about genuine profile more than anything else these days.
When you forget that, and chase what someone else is doing because it looks like it’s working, it gets harder to write posts, update pages, or explain what your business even does through that lens, and you start looking sideways instead of forward.
The irony is that a lot of what makes successful brands successful is clarity of mindset, which can only come from knowing who you are. This is especially important in a world where everyone is slowly starting to sound like an AI-generated ad-read or LLM.
So, What Can Competitor Marketing Inspire?
It may help you see where the winds are blowing, the investment placed in it, and social media responses. If you stick to those categories, you’ll mostly be okay, and then march to the beat of your own drum, informed by how others are doing the same. This gives you more insight and market research tools to play with, but it never shrouds where your own actual value lies. It’s easier said than done, but remains the best mindset to keep.
With this advice, we hope you can more easily see how competitor marketing, while worthwhile in some respects, should only inform and not dictate your strategy.
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Marketing