Saturday, February 28  

How we all benefit from competition

Over the past week or so Yahoo has stopped using the results from Google when people search for things via their web site.

Now instead of 1 search engine (Google) providing a lot of the search results on the Internet, Yahoo looks like providing some serious competition.

And competition is always good news

One of our web sites has had a big surge in orders with a lot more people finding the site because the web site is now listed high in Yahoo - that means I, as the provider, am not reliant upon a single other entity for a major part of my marketing strategy. I now have choice.

Web users now have more choice in finding things they search for on the Internet. This competition should result in better (and more relevant) results being displayed by the search engines.

Back in the offline world, here in Australia a new airline has just launched. Jetstar is to take on Virgin Blue in the discount air travel market.

Ticket prices have been slashed and hundreds of thousands of people have been able to snap up heavily discounted tickets.

Good for eveyone

I also think that competition can be healthy for the competing businesses. It gets the business reviewing their processes and building quality. It helps to ensure the best experience for the customer - which results in increased profitability through increasing sales because of the resultant happy customers. It makes the business proactive in meeting their customer's needs - because if they don't, the competition will happily take the unhappy customer away.

Competition is good for everyone. Take a look at your competitors and see what they do better than you. Then do that!

Have a good weekend.

Brendon