If what you do is optional, or what you do has competitors, people can choose NOT to use you! Now read that again. Do you seriously want to give people a reason not to choose you? Read this and get wise to your competition!

Let's say you're in banking. When people need to save money, they can put it under the floorboards or under the mattress. Whey want to borrow money, they can go to the FFF Brigade - friends, family and fools - to lend it to them! A bank is optional. Alternatively, they could take their pick from one of 50 UK banks and a host of international ones. A bank has competitors.

Buyers have choices. In an ever more expanding world, people have ever more varied choices. What strong brands, persuasive sales people and compelling propositions do is narrow those choices. They blind buyers to the competition and encourage them to buy from you. How do you do that? One of the most important ways is to pay a healthy disregard to your competitors.

"When we stopped looking at what our competition were doing and started looking at what our customers were doing, that's when we became number one."

Terence Leahy, CEO of Tesco, one of the largest supermarket chains in the world

If you pay too much attention to your competitors, you are in danger of looking, thinking and acting like them. That's why 90% of banks, accounting and legal firms do exactly the same. You have three choices with competitors:

1. Devote more than 1% of your TME (time, money and effort) monitoring them and allowing them to dictate your strategy.
2. Ignore them completely.
3. Something in-between.

Now I'm not advocating the first two. Why? Because you need to have some idea. You can get great ideas from your competitors on both what to do and what not to do. But keep it healthy! Save room for innovation. Sail your own ship. Plough your own furrow. Do your own thing.

When you do, you'll find that you give people a good reason to choose you instead of all of their other choices, including doing nothing!