Strategy Note 5: Copying Is Surrender
Copying your competitors feels like strategy but functions as surrender.
The logic seems reasonable. Someone else has figured out what works. They have tested messaging, validated positioning, proven that a market exists. Why reinvent the wheel when you can study what succeeds and replicate it?
Because replication makes you a less authentic version of whatever they already are.
When you copy, you compete on their terms, in their territory, using their playbook. You have accepted their definition of the game and agreed to play by their rules. The best possible outcome is second place.
And second place in a crowded market often looks like invisibility. The original gets credit for innovation. The copy gets dismissed as derivative—or worse, not noticed at all because it offers nothing distinctive enough to remember.
This happens constantly. A brand sees a competitor's aesthetic gaining traction and adjusts their visual identity to match. A founder notices someone else's messaging resonating and adopts similar language. A business observes a competitor's content strategy performing well and implements the same approach.
Six months later, they look like everyone else. They sound like everyone else. They have become interchangeable, commoditized, competing on price because there is nothing else to compete on.
The alternative requires more courage.
Instead of asking "What is working for them?" ask "What is true for me?" Go beyond studying competitor positioning. Study your own history, your own perspective, your own strange and specific combination of experiences that no one else shares.
Find the intersection of what you do best, what your audience craves, and what no one else is offering. That intersection exists. It might be smaller than the broad territory your competitors have claimed, but it is yours entirely.
Claim that territory so completely that comparison becomes meaningless. Don’t be a better version of what already exists. Be the only version of something new.
This is harder than copying. It requires original thinking when imitation is easier. It requires confidence in your own perspective when external validation feels safer. It requires willingness to be wrong, to try something untested, to fail in ways that copying might have prevented.
But it is the only path to being the first choice rather than an acceptable alternative.
The businesses that copy successfully are usually the ones with more resources than the original—they can outspend, outdistribute, outmarket. If you don’t have those advantages, copying just puts you in a race you cannot win.
The businesses that create something genuinely new don’t need those advantages. They’re not racing anyone. They’re walking a path no one else is on.
Study your competitors. Understand the landscape. Know what exists so you can identify what is missing. But don’t mistake that research for your strategy. Your strategy comes from what you do with the knowledge, which should be to find the gap, not fill the mold.
Stay Curious,
