“With increasingly rapid cycle times in technology, competitive benchmarking is becoming less useful. If none of your competitors has made a tough decision to reorganize a department, shift financial resources to new ways of doing things in marketing or customer service, how can you improve via benchmarking? Stated a different way, if your process is broken and all of your competitor’s processes are broken, you can’t possibly create market leadership by benchmarking. You have to hire the best and most brilliant people who hold little if any limiting beliefs and give them the authority to innovate based on what customers want.

Serving those needs in the Peter Drucker fashion is the only way to create true market leadership. This does not mean that competitive analysis is dead. It does mean that the benchmarks you need to pay attention to are the breakthroughs regardless of industry.”

David Dalka
Marketing Strategy Consultant