Knowing the competition is nice, knowing yourself is business critical.

Don’t be fooled by the title of this article, we can’t stress enough how important it is to get a good understanding of your rivals and how they behave. In business, you need to know your playing field, something we call the competitive landscape. It would be foolish not to. But, you can’t go looking to create something unique, by scanning the competition, right?

Knowing the competition is important, but it’s also fairly simple. You analyze them, define their strengths and weaknesses and in most cases plot them on a scale. You see what everyone else is doing and you spot gaps in the markets. All true, but also very limiting if you use this data too much to define your company’s journey.

Knowing yourself as a company or brand is on a whole other level on the importance-scale. By fully grasping what defines you as a company, you can use it as the compass for all business decisions. Each company exists for a specific reason. Whether you call it your vision, your purpose or your ‘why’, it portrays the ultimate reason you are doing what you doing. Pure inspiration, drive and direction comes from within your company, your founder, your leadership. You don’t get this form looking at your rivals.

If you don’t know who you truly are or if this has faded over the years, you risk defining yourself by the opportunities in the competitive landscape. You define who you are, by defining what the others are not. No long-term success has ever come from this approach.

You can only be consistently successful if you passionately believe in the value you bring on a daily basis for your customers and employees and apply it in everything you do.

Having a strong identity is business critical in today’s marketplace, where your brand’s capacity to differentiate comes more and more from the way you act and behave in your own way. It creates clarity for the whole company. It gives employees a framework for ownership and belonging, and provides customers a platform to really connect beyond the products you are selling. Self-esteem and a strong sense of invincibility result from it.

Knowing who you are as a company makes everything flow.