Competition is good for you

A lot of my mentoring clients come to me terrified of competition.

It's easy to understand why - I was there myself at one point.

We've all been hypnotised into thinking like consumer brands. For a consumer brand, competition *is* bad. Here's why. In a typical consumer Market there's limited demand and over supply: in other words too many vendors chasing not enough buyers. So the law of supply and demand pushes prices down.

And many coaches put themselves into the same position by not specialising enough.

But imagine you were the marketing director of Aston Martin, eager to sell more cars.

If you just thought of yourself as a "car manufacturer" the solution is simple: lower the price of your cars and you'll sell more of them. And if you want to maximise sales you would create a funnel of different models at different price points for different levels of consumer.

So why doesn't Aston Martin do that?

Because they're not in a market that requires that model!

In Aston Martin's world, consumers come primed with one simple thought: "I want an Aston Martin".

They're not doing the rounds of different dealerships, taking lots of different cars for test drives and compating prices.

And they're willing to pay whatever Aston Martin asks, even though it's 10 of 15 times the price of a Ford or GM car. Some want to feel like James Bond, others want to "borrow" Aston Martin's positioning for high-end luxury.

So to Aston Martin the competition is irrelevant, right?

Wrong.

You see, even though Aston don't get compared directly to Ford and GM, they do get compared indirectly.

What I mean is: the kind of person who wants to buy an Aston Martin often wants it precisely because it's ten times the price of a "standard" brand.

If those other brands weren't there, Aston Martin would get compared to other luxury brands, on a like-for-like basis, and it would be undifferentiated.

Selling high-priced coaching programs is just the same as selling high-priced cars.

And it starts by targeting a narrow section of the market--in my next book, which is all about selling high-priced coaching programs, I'm covering this idea of dominating your market category in detail--and becomeing their obvious choice.

So embrace your competition, and be happy that they're selling to a big niche and pricing at "the going rate": if it wasn't for them, you wouldn't have the opportunity to charge what your programs are truly worth.

Rob Cuesta's next book "The Natural Expert" will be available through Amazon in December 2011.