Copycats abound in marketing. If business leaders have any kind of awareness of their competition’s efforts to draw customers to their brand, there seems to be an uncanny temptation to copy their marketing. I have talked to many business leaders who think that being a marketing impersonator will bag great results. It was the 18^th century English writer, Samuel Johnson, who said, "No man is ever great by imitation.” That is very true of marketing.

There are several reasons you don’t want to copy your competition’s marketing. First, you will never be number one by mimicking the original. If you are fine being the second choice, go ahead and be a copycat. Second, are you sure they are being successful with their marketing? Too often people fall in love with the creative effort behind marketing without examining the most important aspect of the effort: does it draw customers to buy what you are selling. How many times have you watched a funny commercial and 10 seconds after you have a great laugh, you cannot remember the brand?

However, there is a more basic reason why you don’t want to copy marketing from your competitors. When everyone is saying the same thing, there is no distinction between one brand and another. When there is no difference in the mind of the consumer, the lowest bidder will gain their business. Let me illustrate this point. I was asked to be a judge at a chili cookoff a few years ago. In case you are not aware of this kind of event, it involves several cooks who take their best shot at making the best pot of chili. My job was to taste a little of each batch and declare a winner. They all tasted great, but for the most part, they all tasted the same. How do you declare a winner when you cannot not distinguish one from the other? There was one bowl of chili which stood out from the others. It was made as a white chili instead of a red chili. The individualism made them stand out and they were declared the winner.

Another reason you might not want to copy the competition’s marketing is it may not be your best foot forward. Every brand has its strengths and weaknesses. Marketing should promote your brand’s strongest features. It should also contrast those strengths against your competition’s weaknesses, especially when those weaknesses are being noticed by your target market. In other words, if the competition is zigging instead of zagging, you should zag – that is, if two things are true. First, only zag if you can do so well and, two, if your customers deem zagging something they would value.

What if your customers don’t see a value in your zagging strengths? This is where marketing needs to go to work. If you promote your strengths, you will find that the more consumers hear it, the more likely they will come around to see the merit of what you are promoting. A case in point would be when Smartphones were first introduced. People may have seen the value of having a phone that could also be a computer, play music and search the internet. Texting had already become a thing. So had social media posts. Who needed a phone to be a camera? Ah, but the makers of these new phones (Apple) understood that if they kept promoting phones as cameras, the value of the phone would not be to make calls, but to document every moment of life on social media. Now you cannot buy a phone without a camera that has features better than a real camera! In other words, the new zag became the key feature people would clamor for when buying a phone.

The next time you see your competition put out a great piece of marketing, I would encourage you to step back before you copy what they are doing. Instead take a look at how you can promote the uniqueness of your brand. Put your best foot forward. Build a case for why your features are exceptional and why people should buy from you. Let your marketing lead, not follow.