The Competition

In any market, there are four fundamental situations:

  • You are alone in the market.

  • You are in a dead heat with a competitor.

  • You are behind a competitor.

  • You are ahead of a competitor.

In any of these cases, you need to make important judgments about the direction in which the market is moving, about the direction your competition (if any) is coming from and going to, and about what your intercept vector will be.

A Little Anthropology

Before we analyze the interesting characteristics of and advance appropriate responses to each of these four competitive situations, let’s spend a moment considering the nature of the competitive experience. I’m sure a real anthropologist could do better, but it does seem to me that the organizing ...

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