Unless you’ve been avoiding the news altogether, you’ve probably seen the Southampton FC ‘spygate’ story doing the rounds, that has led them to losing out on play-off position for promotion to the Premier League.

I’m not here to decide whether it was clever, desperate, completely overblown or just one of those bizarre football stories that we’ll all forget about in a few weeks.

But it did make me laugh because, in a strange way – and as I like to find an analogy in everything – it’s not all that different to what I see happening in marketing.

Businesses spend a surprising amount of time watching everyone else.

• What are our competitors posting?
• What events are they exhibiting at?
• Should we start a podcast because they’ve started one?
• They’re doing videos… should we be doing videos?
• They’ve redesigned their website… perhaps ours needs redesigning too.

Don’t get me wrong, keeping an eye on your competitors is sensible – infact I’d encourage it. You should understand your market, know who’s saying what, what’s new and know what’s changing.

Where I think businesses come unstuck is when observation turns into copycat imitation.

Just because something appears to be working for someone else doesn’t mean it’ll work for you; you don’t know what happened before that LinkedIn post appeared, you don’t know how long they’ve been refining their messaging, you don’t know whether that one podcast you saw took weeks to make and hasn’t generated a single enquiry, you don’t know if that shiny new website is actually converting visitors (or cot a fortune to design and build) – you’re only seeing the full time whistle.

It’s a bit like watching the highlights (or the training games) and assuming you know all the tactics.

So often I see businesses trying to reverse-engineer someone else’s success – we’ve even had competitors trying to ‘get hold’ of a marketing plan of one of the clients I work for (true story!), it’s great to be the original but it’s not so great being the one who are following.

It’s not as simple as ‘we’ll post like them’ or ‘we’ll copy their website and change a few words’ or ‘we’ll do a really similar campaign’ – unfortunately marketing doesn’t work like that. Or we’d all be doing it!

What you’re seeing is usually the outcome of hundreds of decisions that happened long before you noticed the end result. You didn’t see, or know, the strategy, the positioning, the customer research, the conversations with the sales team, all the things that failed first….the bits nobody gets to see.

And even if you could copy every single one of those things, you’d still end up with something that isn’t yours.

One of the reasons the strongest brands stand out is because they sound like themselves, not because they sound like the business down the road. Ironically, that’s what makes competitor research so valuable.

Not so you can copy what everyone else is doing, but so you can spot the gaps and the missed opportunities that they’re not playing on.

• Where are they all saying the same thing?
• What conversations aren’t happening?
• What questions aren’t being answered?
• How can you explain something differently?

That’s exactly where your opportunity lives.

As for Southampton FC – let them be a lesson to you – copying someone else’s homework doesn’t always end particularly well.

In football, it might get you cancelled. In marketing, it usually just gets you ignored.

So, keep an eye on your competitors. Learn from them, be inspired by them but don’t become a carbon copy of it. Because noone knows your product/service better than you!