Do not Ignore the Companies Who Came Before You

You are about to open up a new business. You want to do something unique, something no one else has ever done before, and you do not care about the other people in your field. You want your marketing to grab a person's attention right away and you want to pull business away from the places that have been around for a long time.

Yet why do so many of these companies then decide to not bother looking at the marketing material from these other companies at all, like say, printing greeting cards like most competitors are doing? They go down the path they want and they completely ignore what everyone else is doing as if they were the only person in the industry?

This can lead to all sorts of problems and can ensure that you are not about to generate the kind of business that you were expecting.

Maybe you decide that you are going to get greeting card printing done because you have not been getting greeting cards in the mail from other companies, so you just assume no one else is using it. This will be just the unique kind of marketing you need to put yourself on the map.

However, in turns out that the competition really has been getting them done for the past few years, you just had not really noticed, and when you start making them too your greeting card just gets lost in a pile of greeting cards, nothing unique or interesting about it.

This could have been avoided if you had taken the time to really look at the rest of the playing field. Why enter into the market completely blind to what everyone else is doing if you are then going to compete against them?

When a sports team is going to go against another prominent team I can bet you they are looking at footage from that other team's past games. This helps them be certain that they know what to expect and they are not surprised.

Furthermore, I bet you as soon as you start up your company the competition is taking a good long look at what you are up to in an effort to make sure you do not take their business.

This is why you really need to keep your eyes open. Maybe greeting card printing really would be a unique way to get your name known, or perhaps instead you need to put up posters or hand out some booklets. You cannot know any of this until you have researched the market and seen what people like and do not like.

There is no reason to enter anything blind if you do not have to. If you are new to an industry than you have a natural advantage: the competition does not know what you can do yet. They have the natural disadvantage from the fact that you know everything they can do. Make proper use out of your advantage.


Katie Marcus writes about the greeting card printing or print greeting cards technologies.