The Smartest Companies Don’t Copy Their Competitors. They Do This Instead

What if the worst parts of your industry were your best opportunity?

EXPERT OPINION BY ANDREA OLSON, CEO, PRAGMADIK @PRAGMADIK

Illustration: Getty Images

Your strategy team just came back from a benchmarking exercise. They visited your top competitor, took notes, and made slides. Now they’re recommending you replicate three of that company’s best practices. Congratulations, you’ve officially committed to becoming a slightly worse version of someone else. 

Benchmarking is a convergence machine. When every company in a market studies the same leaders and copies the same strengths, the whole category slowly homogenizes into one undifferentiated blob. Somewhere in that process, customers stop noticing you because you gave them no reason to. There’s a counterintuitive question to ask instead. 

What are your competitors doing badly? 

Not mediocrely or inconsistently, but what are your competitors doing badly? These are the things customers quietly tolerate because there’s no alternative. It’s what your rivals have convinced themselves don’t matter. Also, it’s the things they’ve been ignoring for so long they’ve stopped noticing the gap. That’s where your differentiation lives. 

Restaurateur Will Guidara took his staff to visit a higher-ranked competitor — not to admire it, but to dissect it. He didn’t ask them to take notes on what was exceptional. He asked them to find what was neglected. What they found was the coffee was forgettable, and beer drinkers were treated like second-class citizens in a wine-obsessed room. 

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Two moves followed. A coffee obsessive on staff became the coffee sommelier. A craft beer enthusiast in the kitchen became the beer sommelier. Within a short time, Guidara’s restaurant climbed from #50 to #1 in the San Pellegrino rankings. He didn’t out-execute his competitors on their strengths, but he dominated the territory they’d abandoned. 

That’s reverse benchmarking, and it’s one of the most underleveraged strategic tools available to businesses right now. 

Why your industry’s “standards” are opportunities

The status quo in any industry exists not because it’s optimal, but because it’s what everyone agreed on a long time ago and nobody thought to challenge. Things like late fees, complicated onboarding, jargon-heavy communication, and indifferent follow-up. These aren’t features. They’re fossils. 

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