What Every Entrepreneur Should Know About Imitation
When starting a business, will you imitate the leading brand or do things your own way? While the latter is the typical answer, Marty Nemko of Kplinger.com says it’s better to replicate than innovate:
Being a guinea pig is so risky: Your idea or its execution could easily be flawed, or it can be so new that the public isn’t ready for it. Tivo, an unquestionable improvement over the VCR, lost hundreds of millions of dollars in its first five years as it tried to educate the public. You probably don’t have hundreds of millions of dollars and five years to wait for profitability.
Although our main goal is to differentiate our brand from competition, some situations justify the need for imitation:
- Benchmarking or adopting best practices from another industry
- When a particular feature, process, or service is considered a standard in your chosen industry. If these are not available then your business will not be considered at par with the leading players.
However, there are certain limits to imitation such as:
- Using a confusingly similar brand name, logo design or colors.
- Copying the content from your competitors’ websites, brochures, sales letters, and other marketing materials.
