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I still remember an enormous lecture on plagiarism in highschool – it was within the early days of the Internet, and our teacher said, “If you rip a report off the Internet and use another person’s work as your individual – it’s against the law! “
Now, in the case of a college report, it’s pretty obvious when someone copies you. But in business, this is just not at all times the case, and while it is commonly copied, the legality of doing so is debated.
Sometimes it’s quite obvious. But other times your follower could be someone who brings their very own ideas to yours (and perhaps even does it higher). Either way, you have to learn cope with copycats—whether or not they steal your work illegally or grow to be legitimate competitors.
Related: How to Maintain Your First Market Position in a World of Copycats
1. Get flattered first – then do the legal checklist
When you see someone copying your online business, your first response might be to be furious – you have been working on an idea for years and now it’s just being stolen? This can definitely be frustrating. But really, you need to be honored. Think about it: “Wow, anyone think we have mimicked? I should get a pat on the back.”
So if someone copies you, be proud.
Once you have congratulated yourself, make a mental checklist to be certain no rules are being broken. You need not call an attorney (yet) – just check to see if any of the trademarks or copyrighted graphics and texts you have applied for are getting used by so-called competitors. You also needs to check that they should not violating the trade dress policy – in other words, when the appear and feel of their product is close enough to yours to confuse the buyer.
At the start of my company, Trainual, we had a competitor who went up to now as to repeat our entire website. They were so blatant and lazy that their copy even used the word “Trainual” in lots of places. At that time, we engaged an attorney and settled it with an easy stop and desist letter. And if you will have someone copying you want that, you must probably contact a lawyer as well.
2. Does your follower do an excellent job in any respect?
I remember years ago a friend coming back from a visit to New York with a pile of bootleg VHS tapes he had bought on Canal Street—tapes that somebody had just recorded from their seat within the theater. They were terrible – blurry shots, people walking in front of the camera – the tapes were almost unwatchable. It wasn’t like I used to be going to skip seeing a movie on the theater because I used to be watching these bootlegs.
It’s the identical with business: if you will have a competitor who is essentially a low-quality bootleg of your organization, there’s nothing to fret about. Needless to say, the competitor who copied our entire site is gone – when a copycat tries to sell such a poor imitation, there’s nothing to fret about.
But sometimes there will be cause for concern. What in case your follower does Good position? Or worse, a greater job than you? Now you will have legitimate competition. Think: how are you going to compete with them in the longer term?
Related: Want to show strong competition into a bonus? Copy the competition’s best features.
3. Stand out along with your strategy
Jeff Bezos once said, “If we are able to keep the competition focused on us while we give attention to the shopper, all the things will likely be positive in the long run.” This implies that if you happen to spend all of your time worrying about your copycat competitor, your online business will grow to be a series of restless, knee-jerk reactions and you’ll find yourself constructing the identical products or providing the identical services as everyone else. Instead, give attention to the shopper and their needs. In this fashion, you’ll distinguish yourself from the people who find themselves most significant to you.
Take, for instance, Southwest Airlines. When they began, that they had to search out a solution to enter the moderately competitive aviation industry. So their goal was to grow to be a low-cost carrier they usually were in search of customers who desired to get from one place to a different as efficiently as possible.
They did this by making every seat on every plane the identical – which meant they didn’t must allocate seats – they usually could swap people out of the flights quite easily. (In case you didn’t know, Southwest was once the one airline that did not charge switching fees.) This tactic works for Southwest’s low-cost strategy, and now they’ve an incredibly loyal following.
Other carriers, whose strategies depend on various kinds of fares and classes of service, haven’t been in a position to copy Southwest’s model of open seats, even in the event that they have found that individuals prefer it higher. That’s because their strategy won’t allow them to sell every seat as if it were the identical, so the “efficient travel” customer will likely be flying from Southwest. Instead of specializing in what other airlines are doing, Southwest has focused on what their customers want. And it paid off.
Build your strategy around your customers and your followers will at all times be one step behind you because they will not know what you are doing next. After all, your customers will recognize you as an original, and in case your imitators don’t stand out, they will not exist for very long.
