As we’ve discussed, it is becoming more and more imperative for your brand to tell a compelling story. But what happens when you have significant competition? How do you respond to competing stories in your industry?

Perhaps you try to post more creative images on Facebook, or worse, spend money buying more Likes for your page. Maybe you are selling a similar product for a little bit cheaper. Or perhaps you are positioning your product so that it is better/cheaper/faster than theirs. If so, chances are it’s not going as well as you hoped. But why? A pivotal principle that we need to understand is that we cannot succeed by trying to tell our competition’s story better than they do. Out yelling someone with the same story is nearly impossible.

The answer to this dilemma is a difficult lesson to learn. Our human instinct is to simply follow the leader. To jump on the ‘brandwagon’, if you will. We find out what is working for the competition then emulate or out-do it. If they are winning on price-point, we lower our price to beat them. If they produce their product faster, we implement systems to be quicker. The problem with this is that once a consumer has bought a competitor’s story, persuading them to switch to your story is essentially asking the consumer to admit he was wrong. Instead, we tell a different story. One that is more important and more valuable then that of your competitor. If they are selling the story of cutting edge technology, you sell the story of time tested reliability. If they are selling commodities, you sell custom works of art.

It comes down to this:

WalMart can’t out-Amazon, Amazon.
Seb Vettel can’t out-Michael Schumacher, Michael Schumacher.
Ford can’t out-Honda, Honda.
Blockbuster can’t out-Netflix, Netflix.

Nor should they try. While the second imitator might make it pay, the third, the fourth, the tenth…. not so much. The more you try to fit in, the worse you do. The more you rush to follow the leader, the less likely you will be to catch up.