Managers Message: Inside Out Competition @ Burke’s Billing Builders.

Most people I meet in the media business love competition. We love to compete and even better, we love to win. Competition is what drives us. If your group is as competitive as many I know, you wake up to fight each day. Small victories are very meaningful, big victories are reason to light up a Red Auerbach cigar. So can competition be bad?

I ran a group of radio stations in Denver a few years back and we had a myopic focus on beating a competing radio group in ratings and revenue. If you sell media, you know putting a target on a competitor’s back can be a powerful motivator. And it worked for us in Denver…for a while. But here’s what we discovered:

Our people really wanted to compete with themselves.

It’s fun to have a target in your sights. It’s an easy rallying point and it gets people focused on the expectations of performance. But people can interpret the attack as doing your bidding, not theirs. In other words, the competitive focus can be too far outward and not enough inward.

Yes, it takes personal excellence to be able to launch an attack on a competitor. And that requires inner focus. But if the focus is too much outside of your building instead of inside, you risk having your staff members becoming disillusioned. After all, it’s their own growth they’re really concerned with. And that was the lesson of my experience in Denver.

In Spanish Language media, the challenges are even greater. Not only do you have a growing number of competitors outside the building (and you may be the one with the target on your back), but many media outlets are still growing their staffs and really need a consistent focus inside the building. By creating a culture of competition inside the building, you’re more likely to grow excellence within your ranks. It’s my experience that high fliers only want to work with other high fliers. And clearly this gives you the best chance of winning outside the building.

Drawing a bead on a competitor can also be risk laden. Sure, it’s fun to shoot at “the bad guy” but if the bad guy has more ammo than you do, you could be in for a long and demoralizing fight, just like Eagle Snacks. Remember them? When they burst on the scene in the 1990’s, they wanted a piece of the Frito Lay empire of crunchy, salty snacks. They quickly captured 6% of the market with new products and strong marketing. However, Frito Lay responded with an overwhelming counterattack of advertising, price cuts, and distribution leverage. Eagle is out of business.

We have to be careful with whom we pick our battles. But if you keep battling to have your staff compete with themselves first, the outside fights can be easier to win.

Bottom Line: Fan the competitive fires of your business by keeping a strong focus of getting better at what you do instead of getter better than the competitor. It’s important to know what to attack and what to expect, but if you don’t spend the time and energy inside, you’ll get slaughtered outside.

Dave Burke is President of Burke Media Marketing, Inc, an advertising sales training consultancy. Dave works with radio, TV, and cable sales teams and their clients to help them dominate their markets. He can be reached at (603) 746-5588 or http://www.BurkeMediaMarketing.com

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