Collaborating with competition ..

Usually when we have competition in the area we work, everybody tend to be secretive about it, doing things behind the scene so that the competition is not aware of your actions and plans. We take extra care in snooping on what the competitor is planning to do and try to get what his immediate and long term plans are. If it is a product  company we tend to look at the new product releases in the market by competitors and see how it affects our position in the market.

But in some sectors the competitors can collaborate or cooperate, help to build the market and within the market, compete with the same players with whom one has collaborated in setting up the market. We call this process Coopetition. 

An article in HBR When should you collaborate with the competition (click here) by Graham Kenny Jan 2021, speaks about this coopetition process in Australia, how the wine growers and Avocado growers collaborated in the initial stages decades back to educate the consumers about the benefits of wine and Avocado and later with an increasing aware customer base, compete in the same market to get a share of the market.

This strategic move can help create new markets, till now unknown and unexplored.

A similar exercise was undertaken by Amazon with the introduction of their Personal Assistant Echo dot in the India market by 2017. A customer base unaware of the product and how the AI product could change their life, underwent a series of informational campaigns by Amazon through the print and electronic media to educate the customers. 

Once the customers became aware of the technology and industry competition understood the potential of this new AI contraption that could slowly change the way humans interact with machines, Google through the Google Home, Microsoft through Cortana and Apple through Siri have also entered the market and are competing with each other to get a share of the market. 

George..