You shouldn't copy competitors in business!

[Coin_info]

Customers who value quality would always go for the original products and not something replica

Products that copy other products in terms of design does not make them less original in my opinion sometimes these products just copy other products to be able to create alternatives to these products in case people cannot afford the expensive ones they just come for them that are cheaper and it is their business strategy targeting the people who do not have a lot of money, but will not mind owing a copy of that same product that still does the job.

It is a cunny business strategy that is still effective in its own way.

[drangos]

I believe it's important to distinguish copying a competitor and studying the market. A competitor has the opportunity to show the level of willingness of customers to pay for, their dissatisfaction with, and the weaknesses in the customer experience. That's information, but the key is to overcome one of those drawbacks in a unique way. Otherwise, you'll just be following the lead of another person. A good company will always rely on information from its rivals and not use them as a template. That can result in better decisions that are still original.

[ruykeri]

I do not completely agree with this idea. If any company copy a successful competitors their brand and releases a product at a lower price with better features than theirs, then people will accept it. Then they will definitely buy the one that provides something better at a lower price. If you think about the smartphone industry, when the prices of Samsung or Apple phones were very high, at that time, Chinese phones with the same features  or in some cases better features were provided in the market at a much lower price. At that time, poor or under developing countries like ours were more interested to buy those phones. They were copying, even in many cases they provided more features but at a lower price. People of all income levels could afford to buy those phones. And it also gained enough acceptance all over the world. Later, but now Chinese brands make all kinds of phones. They are making phones from very expensive phones to low-cost phones. They have gained people's trust, so now those who can afford it have also started buying Chinese brand phones at higher prices. Even though they copied at beginning , they were able to attract people by keeping the price a little lower by providing something better.

[demonica]

This one is inevitable in the market cause if someone sees that this kind of thing is getting hype from people, they will definitely copy the same to be able to make profit from it too. That's why for bigger companies, they always apply for patent and trademark so others can't just  easily copy them. However, for small businesses, this is more common as small businesses don't really have much in them to even apply for trademark or patent. For business minded people, as long as they see opportunity to make profit over something, they will do it as well. Others will try to redevelop or improve it to brand it as something "better" over the others. Now it will look like they have the edge over the competitors even if the idea isn't originally from them.

Now if a brand doesn't have a competitor, then the brand would probably just stay the same over the years without trying to develop and improve their brand because there's no competition at all. There's no need to improve because the market accepts it as it is and you won't have to worry about other brands stealing your customers.

[Solodoski]

I think one way to get into an already existing market where there is a lot of competitors,  you need to realize that you don't need to copy them, but rather come with something different,  that makes your product unique. I believe before venturing into any kind of business especially production, you need to do a proper research and market survey,  because this helps you understand the market and also know what the customers really needs. I am not saying it's entirely bad to copy from you competitors, but I think you have to try and improve on what your competitors already have, so you can gain a good ground in the market. This is just my opinion,  and I am willing and ready to learn from other people's post and reply.

[Faisal2202]

Following a successful competitor can be a good idea, especially if you are a newcomer in the world of business and have no idea what you are doing. But once you have established yourself and your business, you should not be following in the steps of others but rather creating your own path forward. The reason is very simple: What can be good for one businessman/businesswoman, does not mean it will be good for someone else who is trying to emulate them.

The most successful businesses come from originality, not copycatting someone.

The most successful businesses never copied and pasted anything. They copied and improved the existing ideas, and that's how they became successful. It is like a gap. There are many businesses doing it, we can find many examples. Google search engine crossed Yahoo for a reason. Apple and Samsung also crossed Nokia for a reason.

I won't compare such big names. I am small, I will talk small, something I can start. So recently near my house, two fast food points were opened. One that opened first is getting less sales now because they have bad taste. The second that opened is getting more sales, because they have more sales. The first one then took an action to report the second one, accusing them they are violating rules. Food authority visited them, found nothing, and now they got free advertisement in the region. They are the only two for at least 20k people. So idea alone is not enough. In here, don't know about anywhere else, but here petrol pumps of different companies will open their branches right in front of each other.

[goldkingcoiner]

Following a successful competitor can be a good idea, especially if you are a newcomer in the world of business and have no idea what you are doing. But once you have established yourself and your business, you should not be following in the steps of others but rather creating your own path forward. The reason is very simple: What can be good for one businessman/businesswoman, does not mean it will be good for someone else who is trying to emulate them.

The most successful businesses come from originality, not copycatting someone.

The most successful businesses never copied and pasted anything. They copied and improved the existing ideas, and that's how they became successful. It is like a gap. There are many businesses doing it, we can find many examples. Google search engine crossed Yahoo for a reason. Apple and Samsung also crossed Nokia for a reason.

I won't compare such big names. I am small, I will talk small, something I can start. So recently near my house, two fast food points were opened. One that opened first is getting less sales now because they have bad taste. The second that opened is getting more sales, because they have more sales. The first one then took an action to report the second one, accusing them they are violating rules. Food authority visited them, found nothing, and now they got free advertisement in the region. They are the only two for at least 20k people. So idea alone is not enough. In here, don't know about anywhere else, but here petrol pumps of different companies will open their branches right in front of each other.

Not everyone is as innovative, and I am talking about the majority of businesses while you are giving me examples of businesses that were not started on unique ideas as a foundation. Sure, the foundation is important and there needs to be change otherwise everything would stay the same and there would be nothing new and innovative, but for most businesses it is not about being innovative and new, most businesses are just trying to earn money- not become what investors would consider unicorns.

[SatoPrincess]

I don’t think it’s a mistake because brands do that all the time, they just steal like an artist. The mistake is when you copy a successful brand without adding your own idea or uniqueness to it. There’s a school of thought that believes that every idea has been thought of by someone already, and everything else we consider new is just recycling an old idea and making it more interesting.

[snowpega]

Following a successful competitor can be a good idea, especially if you are a newcomer in the world of business and have no idea what you are doing. But once you have established yourself and your business, you should not be following in the steps of others but rather creating your own path forward. The reason is very simple: What can be good for one businessman/businesswoman, does not mean it will be good for someone else who is trying to emulate them.

The most successful businesses come from originality, not copycatting someone.

"Even copying someone's idea requires a brain", right?

Now I will tell you why I am saying this. There is a business model already available to copy or execute that you can use to grow your business. Now what matters is how you are copying other ideas and implementing them your own way. Just for example, if we see the same thing in the programming space, then you will also notice there are a lot of programs whose code is available online (open source), and what many programmers do is that they take that whole code and make some little modifications to it so that they can compete with other available programs in the same category by providing some more features.

And in the same way, you can also implement someone's business idea by making some valuable changes. You just need to be smart; in the time we are living in now, those who work hard do not grow as much as those who do smart work, right? So, why need to start from scratch? Well, this is my point of view on this. CMIIW! What do you think about this?

[Synchronice]

Most upcoming brands make the same mistake early on. They study a competitor who is doing well, and instead of asking why it works, they ask how to do the same thing. New logos, new pricing tiers, new tone of voice, almost a copy of what is already out there.
It feels safe because the competitor has already proved the model works. But it also means the brand is now fighting for the same attention, using the same visual language, telling the same story everyone is telling.

The brands that actually last did the opposite. Liquid Death did not try to look like a healthier, greener version of Evian or Fiji. It looked nothing like water at all, it looked like an energy drink or something dangerous, skull graphics and all.
That decision alone puked it out of the bottled water aisle entirely and out it in s category of its own. It is now valued at over a billion dollars, not because the water is different, but because nobody else in that shelf looked, sounded or behaved like it.

Dove did something similar from a different angle. In 2004 most beauty brands were still running the same playbook; flawless models, retouched skin, the same aspirational imagery repeated fir decades. Dove ran a global study and found that only 2 percent of women worldwide described themselves as beautiful. So instead of running the same ads with a softer tagline, they dropped the professional models entirely and used real women, unretouched. It became one of the most talked about campaigns in advertising history, and it built a following that felt personally connected to what the brand stood for, not just what it sold.

Neither brand won by copying the market leader. They won by building something the market did not already have a name for, some that's quite unique, whether big or small, and then letting their audience decide it belonged to them too. That is the part most brands skip. A logo or a colour palette is easy to copy. A culture that people want to be part of is not.

If your brand is trying to outdo a competitor feature for feature, you might want to step back and ask yourself, "what would this brand look like if that competitor did not exist at all?"

Both of them basically copied their competitors, what they did different is the branding, promotion and marketing, the product was still the same what competitors offered. The thing is, when you create a business and copy the competitor, you should either make manufacturing process more cost-effective than your competitor does and offer competitive prices to customers or you should deliver your product with your customer in a different, better way, which can be done via different, more attractive or innovative packaging, marketing strategy and so on. The bicycle is already invented, it's not necessary to reinvent it. If you pick a new niche where you are the innovator and offer a new product to the market, that's a different subject.

[HajiBagi]

Copy cats wouldn't have any innovation in their head because everything wasn't their idea but the idea of brand that they copied and that's why you see that they find it difficult to outshine the real product that they copied from because it wouldn't have that uniqueness. A brand should look for a unique way to connect customers to their products and impact that emotional feelinga in the customer for the product.

Copy has been what some brand has used to make names for themselves, most of the brand are used to it and i don’t think it will stop, what cause all those brands to copy from another brand’s is because of jealousy, and if a brand can’t do something on its own, it will never progress, although it will not stop them from getting customers but they can’t be proud of their own products, as a brand or a company owner, you should know how to produce what other brands have not done before to get customers attention, some businesses don’t know that once a company make things, they make sure customers know that they are the one that produces it and no matter how many brands attempt to produce the same products people will see it as a fake product.

[KiaKia]

I don't want to rule the idea out because there are people who have copied others and were able to make fortune doing that from the business but if wager comes right in it's not fair at all, most people who copied others business idea failed.

I can't also ruled out the fact that those who created their own business ideas also fails too, it's just how this world works at times, so many people aren't meant to be business runners, but they are forcing themselves on it.

I believe that figuring yourself out is the first step to take, it's not just always about money here and there, figure yourself out so that whatever you lay your hands on will be out of your own zealous.

[lionheart78]

Well, I agree that copying a competitor is unethical, but studying their com plan and enhancing it is not. I think it is normal for business competitors to study the other company and compare it to their own plan, looking at ways to counter their competitors.

Every business wanted to be ahead of the competition, so they cannot avoid spying on what the other company is doing or developing.  But in order to protect oneself, if a company developed something innovative, it should patent it to have at least protection from those copycats.  Sadly, ideas such as strategy and marketing plan cannot be patented nor copyrighted because I read that patent laws do not protect abstract ideas.

[TheUltraElite]

Often times two companies competing would copy stuff made by others and just sustain it over the time, eventually developing new things, new campaigns and new ways to reach its audience.

It does not mean it is a bad thing to do, one of them might go bankrupt and then the other will eventually take over.

Nothing wrong in copying stuff that others have do with minor changes to avoid any lawsuit, most of the companies are doing it everyday.

[Inior]

It is important to look closely at what others are doing especially if you are new to it, there is a difference between learning from others and copying. Learn from others and also develop your own strategy, this is very important when it comes to building your business, your personal strategy could be how your personal marketing process that gets people's attention, this is what makes you different from others. And as someone that has ran a business one advice I can give people is to stop thinking about the fact that you have competitors, it is you vs you, focus more on building your brand and try not to outdo someone else, your energy must be channeled correctly.

[Shadiq]

You can learn business by following others or even be successful for a while, but you cannot build your own brand and reputation. The value of creativity can never be achieved by imitation. When you are new to business, you can learn business by imitating others and even start, but to be successful, you must use creativity.

And you can never be competitive by imitating, there is no competition between fake products and original products. To compete with original products, you also have to use creativity to invent a new product or create a marketing strategy.

[AmaGold70]

Copying a competitor who is doing well in a business is very wrong more especially as a beginner, the reason is because at this point where is competition among these business men, they have made many achievement, and can make or deploy strategy that a beginner in business may not be comfortable with. For instance, a business man who is already doing well can be involved in giveaway, given bonuses, and even given reasonable discounts to customers, but to a beginner, making this kind of strategy to make your business work may be very cumbersome for a beginner, and can make the business of a beginner collapse if not properly handled.

[Pablo-wood]

If a person can use his creativity to think differently than others, then his chances of success increase. Be it in business or anything else. Yes, I have also seen many businessmen who try to imitate other brands, to be honest, this is also striking to me, and at the same time, I have also seen that businessmen cannot achieve much success.
But there are some businessmen who, when they start running their business with new ideas and thinking innovatively, eventually they go a long way in business.

Every business is expected to have their own unique blueprint to stand out from competitors. Imitating brands limits creativity. For a business to thrive in our current economy on has to think of models work. The days of imitation is gone because the competition is real and more demanding now. I'm in full agreement that innovative approach especially for new businesses is the most reliable way to grow a brand and stand out of the crowd.

[Marykeller]

Most of the businesses we have today, many of them started with the idea of someone else. They saw how it was done and decided to follow suit, without being unique in their approach, so that the business they were in could blossom, be different, and attract many more customers.

I don't know whether it's lazy for people to follow the style they have been taught to run a business or company. Because each time it's the same business plan and product we are getting as customers, with an increased price and a decrease in quality each time. And they think that's all good for us as customers

[BTC FutureKing]

Every business wanted to be ahead of the competition, so they cannot avoid spying on what the other company is doing or developing.  But in order to protect oneself, if a company developed something innovative, it should patent it to have at least protection from those copycats.  Sadly, ideas such as strategy and marketing plan cannot be patented nor copyrighted because I read that patent laws do not protect abstract ideas.

In business and other things everyone wants to be ahead of each other that why knowing every move of the next person that why you can be considered essential. This competition is common in business because no one can stop you from progressing.If you are intelligent and talented you will soon find out about the ideas that are coming your way.This is the modern era.Even in this era you can get something patented and any method is made in such a way that no one else can get it and you get your rights after that it is the responsibility of the government to protect it and its time is limited.