Study your competition and beat it by improving your business

Communications discoveries

Spend some time looking at what other relevant brands are doing. Look at your competitors in all the different categories in which you might be competing. Look in particular at the most popular and successful communications – why are they working? What do they tap into, to elicit such a response? What would feel right for your brand? The Internet has finally completed the destruction of the boundaries between ‘above-the-line’ disciplines (that is TV, press, radio, posters) and ‘below-the-line’ activity (for example direct mail, sponsorship, field marketing and sales promotion). So think of all communications activity as holistic, and look at as many different communications as possible, interrogating this evidence from every angle: the intended message, the design, the logos, the colour schemes, and how all of these are perceived by their target audience.

Your communications audit should look at:

Current activity: who is doing what?
External influences: can you spot the movies, the art, the music and so on which are being alluded to?
Semiotic analysis: what are the signs and symbols of the category?

You can change the rules, but try to understand what the established conventions are. And remember that since many of the ‘rules’ are implicit rather than explicit, it is easy to break the rules without realising. Airlines aiming at business customers tend to show those customers only within the plane and office; showing them in a pleasant outdoor surrounding implies that travellers are not working hard enough and that flying business class is an indulgence rather than a serious business decision.

As a general rule, put yourself in the consumer’s shoes:

Read those magazines that you might not normally read, but which are read by your target audience. Look at the editorial as well as the ads: which of these have the most engaging images?
Watch the same TV programmes as your target audience. Try and see the world through their eyes.
Do you know what music they are listening to? Spend some time listening to their charts and looking at who is being talked about/ written about.
Participate in the more ‘underground’ forms of communication: the chat rooms, the forums, the newsgroups. Don’t just listen to what is being said; be prepared to take part. Finally, remember to consider any international implications:
How do the international brands manage their communications? Is their approach monolithic (one campaign across all markets), or highly specified (a different campaign for each individual market), or somewhere in-between (for example one campaign for Europe, another campaign for North America)? What do you believe has led to this approach? Is it, for instance, driven by the genuine needs and possibilities of the company’s consumer base? Could it also be driven by the company’s budget constraints, and/or their overall management philosophy?
If your own business plan involves communicating across a number of different markets, you need to decide which of the above three routes would be best for you, and why. Providing your target market is sufficiently homogenous across the different markets, then a cross-border campaign is generally preferred. This type of campaign not only minimises production costs and helps unite all members of your organisation into the same team, but also ensures that your internationallytravelled customers experience your brand in the same way wherever they happen to be.
However, this type of campaign requires rigorous and constant policing in order to ensure that any necessary adaptations for local markets (from the translation of a poster headline, to the coverage of body parts in the Middle East) remain true to the campaign’s overall spirit. If each individual country is given open licence to adapt the campaign as they please, then your intended monolithic campaign will soon fragment beyond recognition. This is not, of course, because your colleagues are deliberately attempting to destroy your campaign; it is simply because any single message can be interpreted in any number of seemingly legitimate ways.

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