Understanding how your business excels where your competition does not is a crucial element in dominating your market. But for this to be achieved, you must first have a well-defined understanding of what your market is in the first place. Once you have a clear understanding of your target market, here are some ways to help your business excel:
- Create your own niche
- Develop your product or services
- Identify external forces
- Provide value and solutions
- Communicate with your market
- Establish credible talent
- Implement cost-leadership strategy
- Competitive analysis
For some leaders, it is not enough just to excel in their field. Rather, they want to dominate! Dominating your target market is a respectable goal and ensures that your vision is strong enough to help you weather the short-term storms that will undoubtedly come your way. This type of mindset believes that in competitive markets, it’s winner take all. These types of leaders are innovators who turn ideas into products people can use. They live by the philosophy of “be different or die” and they believe that it is never acceptable to lose a customer.
In order to dominate your market, it is important to have an innovative business strategy that ensures that there is a plan associated with your current actions. It is also important to understand the different types of innovation so that the company can most effectively capture its share of the value its innovations generate. Here are the different types of innovation:
- Routine Innovation – builds on a company’s existing technological competences and fits with its existing business model. An example of this would be a company like Intel releasing faster processors.
- Disruptive Innovation – requires a new business model but not necessarily a technological breakthrough. This method challenges, or disrupts, the business models of other companies. An example is a company like Google creating the Android operating system and making it available for free.
- Radical Innovation – is the polar opposite of disruptive innovation and the challenge is purely technological. An example of this would be the emergence of genetic engineering and biotechnology in the 1970s and 1980s as an approach to drug discovery.
- Architectural Innovation – combines technological and business model disruptions. An example of this would be Kodak becoming obsolete, and eventually filing for bankruptcy, because it failed to adapt and compete with digital photography requiring competence in the combined fields of solid-state electronics, camera design, software, and display technology.
Entrepreneurs must be able to effectively overcome the prevailing winds that they are up against if their innovation is to become successful. This means that they must be savvy enough to understand what those prevailing winds are. For the entrepreneur who is able to successfully navigate through these issues, he will emerge as a dominant market force as well as emerging financially dominant.