The consumer world has expanded and at the same, has become tougher. Focusing on quality and affordability alone cannot make your product the most popular of all. In this regard, learning consumer behaviour and psyche is important and more important is to know how your competitor is targeting the buyers. In certain cases, keeping a closer eye on how your competitor approaches the sales and coming up with a counter strategy alone can make your brand popular.

Decoding your competitors' sales strategy requires technical analysis and in this regard, understanding of price action is the most important element. To run a successful business, you have to grasp the basics of technical pricing and follow the recent trends. And for this purpose, a thorough understanding of market and its complete analysis is required. If you are in business for quite some time, all of such understanding of the market comes naturally to you.

Sometimes, before rushing into the supposedly profitable market, it is important to understand and evaluate the risks and for this purpose, better your rival than you. It is that point in a business process when leaning back and watching the trends is more advisable than taking robust actions. Approaching the target market from wrong aspect or misleading the buyers through fancy and false info could be the gravest mistake ever to make. In such case, you should be sure of losing 70% of your target market and leaving the rest of 30% agitated enough to take legal actions against you.  

Some companies do not advertise their certain features through television and print ads and instead use their packaging to deliver the message. An aware shopper in the mall has only couple of minutes to choose between the similar items of available brands. Sometimes the attractive packaging of an item cancels all the pretty facts of another brand which were registered repeatedly through advertisements. You never know what clicks the customer and you should never stop trying to figure it out.

Most of us remember the "Cola Wars" where Pepsi and Coca Cola were openly against each other through television advertisements and promotions. Not all the companies and advertising agencies were capable of keeping such activity clean so such practice was later discouraged on serious notes. Coca Cola and Pepsi have been coming up with counter promotions and schemes to outshine each other and in this regard the consistency remained the top ingredient. You can check the current statistic of annual sales count of both the drinks and also the reason for such noticeable difference.

There is no harm in exploiting the consumers tilt for handmade and nature friendly products. Many companies have introduced such product lines parallel to their existing brands. Becoming your own competition is the best way to double the profit but a very wise strategy and approach is required for that. Your approach to capture the consumer market can be similar to your competitor's but never let it go obvious for the consumer to figure out or their loyalties are likely to shift to the one who introduced the feature, promotion or idea in the first place.

Susan Smith is a wholesale business and B2B marketing expert. She writes frequently on the topics related to wholesalers, wholesale manufacturers and trade suppliers.