Recently I was asked to speak with a group of managers from a
large hotel chain about the nature of competition in the changing
commercial environment. For the exercise, I assumed the persona of
a sales rep from St. Louis staying in a Hartford, Connecticut,
property. Each of the hotel managers, by the way, was empowered to
run their individual properties as though they owned them.
The challenge for the managers was complex. Within the larger
context of the hotel's policy, financial expectations and
performance guidelines, they had to "customize" my guest
experience and make me think the entire chain revolved around my
visit. I told them that, minimally, they should have a
comprehensive log of my preferences from past visits (feather
pillow, temperature pre-set at 72 degrees, etc.).
Next, the room should remind me as much of St. Louis as
possible. A current St. Louis newspaper should be on the desk
and/or an up-to-the minute printout of local news, sports scores
and business news. St. Louis TV stations should be fed live into my
room. And room service should be prepared in the style of top St.
Louis restaurants.
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While these services might seem arcane and exorbitant, I assured
the managers that if they weren't prepared to deliver that
level, their chain would fail over time. Why? Because customers
have learned to expect this kind of micro-customized media
provision from dealing with such companies as OnStar or WorldCom or
even Amazon.com.
No, those companies aren't ones hotels typically consider
their competitors. But the bottom line of competition today is that
your direct competitor isn't just someone selling the same
goods or services you sell-it's anyone selling any goods or
services to anyone you sell to, or want to sell to in the future.
At the very least, these unrecognized competitors can raise the bar
(if I can get a book from Amazon overnight, why can't I get
everything overnight?), and one day they just may want to steal
your customers. If you don't understand this new definition of
competition, odds are your business already has one foot in the
grave.
It may be helpful to think of competition in biological terms.
In the same way physics was the dominant science in the information
epoch, biology is becoming the dominant science of the
post-information epoch. Biology reveals four types of relationships
in an ecosystem: competitive, symbiotic, predatory and parasitic.
The same four relationships exist in economies. Today, businesses
may even engage in all four simultaneously.
So who's your greatest competitive threat? The guy down the
block, or the guy across the planet you've never heard of?
I'll bet you know when the guy down the block is coming after
you, but it's the attack by the unknown business operating in a
totally different field that may pose the biggest threat.
Watts Wacker-lecturer, social critic, best-selling author,
political commentator and CEO of FirstMatter-is one of the
world's most respected futurists.