When I first moved to Atlanta in the late 90’s, I remember hearing a very strange tagline on radio ads for a local car dealer: “We’re number two in Atlanta, but we’re going to be number one!”
Constantly.
I sort of get it; they’re going to work hard to win your business, but it really didn’t make much sense to me (and 25 years later it still doesn’t). If you’re going to pay for time on the radio, you should use it wisely and this just didn’t seem like a good use of it.
In Kevin Kelly’s book “Excellent Advice for Living“, he shares this idea:
You can obsess about your customers or you can obsess about beating the competition. Both work, but of the two obsessing about your customers will take you further.
It’s good to know what’s going on with your competition, but focusing hard on your customers is never a bad way to go. The whole concept reminds me of the book “Unreasonable Hospitality“, which is a master course of serving your customers far better than could be reasonably expected.
We know who our competitors are and we keep a close on them (and we’re good friends with many of them), but the more we can focus instead on our clients is always the best thing we can do.
