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I still remember a giant lecture on plagiarism in highschool – it was within the early days of the Web, and our teacher said, “Should you rip a report off the Web and use another person’s work as your own – it’s against the law! “
Now, with regards to a faculty 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 usually copied, the legality of doing so is debated.
Sometimes it’s quite obvious. But other times your follower might just be someone who brings their very own ideas to yours (and perhaps even does it higher). Either way, it’s worthwhile to learn learn how to deal 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
While you see someone copying your 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 may definitely be frustrating. But really, you should be honored. Give it some thought: “Wow, does anyone think we’re successful enough to emulate? 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 make certain no rules are being broken. You needn’t call an attorney (yet) – just check to see if any of the applied trademarks or copyrighted graphics and texts are getting used by so-called competitors. You should also check that they do not violate the trade dress policy – in other words, when the appear and feel of their product is close enough to yours to confuse the buyer.
Originally of my company, Trainual, we had a competitor who went to this point 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 a straightforward stop and desist letter. And if you may have someone copying you want that, you should probably contact a lawyer as well.
2. Does your follower do a great job in any respect?
I remember years ago a friend coming back from a visit to Recent 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 may have a competitor who is essentially a low-quality bootleg of your company, there’s nothing to fret about. Pointless 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 might be cause for concern. What if your follower does Good position? Or worse, a greater job than you? Now you may have legitimate competition. Think: how are you going to compete with them in the longer term?
Related: Need to turn strong competition into a bonus? Copy the competition’s best features.
3. Stand out with your strategy
Jeff Bezos once said, “If we will keep the competition focused on us while we give attention to the client, the whole lot will probably be nice ultimately.” Which means in the event you spend all your time worrying about your copycat competitor, your 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. As an alternative, give attention to the client and their expectations. In this manner, you’ll distinguish yourself from the people who find themselves most vital to you.
Take, for instance, Southwest Airlines. After they began, that they had to seek out a approach to enter the moderately competitive aviation industry. So their goal was to grow to be a low-cost carrier and so they were searching for 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 – and so they could swap people out of the flights quite easily. (In case you didn’t know, Southwest was 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 several types 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 folks prefer it higher. That is because their strategy won’t allow them to sell every seat as if it were the identical, so the “efficient travel” customer will probably be flying from Southwest. As an alternative of specializing in what other airlines are doing, Southwest has focused on what their customers want. And it paid off.
Construct 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. In spite of everything, your customers will recognize you as an original, and if your imitators don’t stand out, they will not exist for very long.