When it comes to the success of your startup, the most important factor is your advantage over your competition. Furthermore, your success as an entrepreneur depends on your plans for, and plans on keeping this advantage for your startup.
Finding your strategic advantage and developing plans on keeping it, means the difference between failure and success in the long-term. With this said, the Brandings Team has pulled together 6 questions to help you identify your startups key advantage. And, what you can do to keep it!
Establish a Sustainable Competitive Advantage
In the very beginning, before you ever even launch your startup, every entrepreneur needs to ask themselves, “what is it that my startup or do better than my competitors?” We wish that were able to tell you but the competitive advantage that you have, or don’t, is individually specific to your startup, at your location.
Your internal quest to find and identify your advantage, requires you, the entrepreneur to have a good understanding of your own capabilities and an understanding of your key competitors.
With that said, the Startup Development Team here at Brandings, has developed a list of 6 question to help determine your competitive advantage. Before you begin, we must inform you that there are many more questions you should be asking yourself. The questions here are simply meant to get you thinking and to spur more questions for yourself.
6 Questions to Help Identify your Startups Key Advantages:
- What are your business strengths?
- Is your location, key to your advantage?
- Superior customer service, is this your competitive advantage?
- The efficiency of your distribution, is this the key to your advantage?
- Does your startup possess a proprietary technology?
- Your better marketing strategy, is this your advantage?
While these questions are poignant, they are not all the question which could be asked. You should continue this exersie and keep on asking yourself these questions. It’s through these questions you can get to your advantage.
The more areas of advantage that you have over your competitors — the greater the chance of initial start-up triumph.
For long term success, you’ll want to consider how “sustainable” the advantage is. For example, a trademark or a patent is an exclusive right granted to you and is highly sustainable. On the other hand, if you provide superior customer service, your competitors could raise their service levels and diminish your advantage.
You’ll also want to take an honest look at what your competitors do better than your start-up. You’ll want to work on these areas or relative weakness before you start your business.
Finally, and of the upmost importance, think of reasons why a customer should come to you over a competitor. If you can’t come up with a list, you should give lots of thought to the viability of the concept.
Brandings has everything you need to hit your start-up targets every time. Our Brand Development Team offers a wide range of services including company naming, premium domain names, strategic planning. Furthermore, we have corporate identity and design services, trademark screening, all of which can be custom tailored to meet all your specific start-up needs.
One way to establish a competitive advantage is though a standout name for your startup. Check out these 8 letter short and powerful names for a business or startup.
Create an Strategic Advantage with A Short and Powerful Brand Name:
Setting up your startup for success is the key to saying in business. Because of this, not only do we understand why, but we encourage you to, find multiple resources of information. Moreover, establish a sustainable competitive advantage is so important, we would love to recommend other resources for you on the subject. Continuing on that subject, recently Inc, Magazine had a great article entitled, How to Turn Your Quirks into Your Businesses’ Competitive Advantage. These small businesses are quirky and not only do they not fear their quirkiness, they embrace it as their competitive advantage!
Finally, we can’t tell you what sets you apart, and what you advantage is, you must figure that out for yourself. Furthermore, you should exploit it and keep it up.