Following your competitors, whether tracking them online or through traditional media, is a time-honored method of gleaning marketing and business insights. Nothing beats competitive intelligence to help you position, price and develop products with an edge.

Yet there comes a time when following the competition is harmful. How? Let me share a story to illustrate my point.

“Ann” (name changed – and I have permission to use her story) offered personal coaching services and decided to follow six personal coaches whose work she admired. She signed up for their free newsletters and downloaded their free E books. She listened to their podcasts, watched their videos, and followed them on Facebook, Twitter, and a host of other social networking sites.

She noted what they were saying and how they were saying it. She noted the prices they charged and the new products and services they offered.

But a funny thing happened along the way…Ann began changing her own pitch to mimic her favorite coaches. If Coach A was offering a new class on branding, Ann tried to offer that. If Coach B was offering a class on using feng shui to set up a home office, Ann looked into it, figuring this was the right way to go. She began to get frustrated because sales and new clients weren’t coming to her as they had been before. Ann updated her website several times, trying new messages, graphics and ideas.

By the time Ann called me, she was at the end of her rope. “I did everything you said,” Ann told me over the phone. “I followed the competitors. But my sales aren’t anywhere near what theirs are!”

When she described who she was following, I said to her, “How do you know what message of theirs over the past year actually worked, and what didn’t?”

Ann hadn’t thought of that. She wasn’t privy to their data; she merely observed what her competitors put forth through their social networking sites, which always sounded rosy and positive. The more we talked, the more I realized that Ann viewed their messages – the frequency and upbeat nature of them – as proof positive that her admired and revered competitors were doing better than she was at gaining new customers. In fact, Ann had no idea if that was true, but she was beating herself up just the same and mucking up whatever hard-earned traction she’d already gained in the marketplace by rushing to change her message, website and products every time a competitor did the same.

Competitive intelligence can show us if someone is doing something similar or different. What it cannot tell us is whether or not they were successful at it. Unless a company is publicly traded and must be law disclose its sales in an Annual Report or shareholder prospectus, you have NO idea whether or not their new marketing pitch worked.

Before changing what you are doing in response to competitive activities, consider the following pros and cons.

Pros of Following Competitors

• Learn from peers

• Gain an understanding of the other products, services and price points your customers and potential customers are seeing

• Glean ideas

Cons of Following Competitors

• Tendency (if insecure or new to the industry) to judge oneself against competitors without adequate facts

• Trap of falling into the “me too” mentality, or developing products re-actively rather than proactively

• Not following your own personal brand or discovering your own inner brilliance

Ann decided to “unfriend” and stop following many of her competitors last month. When I last spoke with her, she had happily renovated her website and already had two new leads. She’d gone back to her own unique, funky and quirky style, which attracted clients to her consulting practice who she loved working with. And instead of worrying about how her revenues stacked up against others, she looked only at this quarter of her earnings as compared to last quarter; really, that’s the only benchmark you can use.

If you’ve ever gone hiking on a rugged trail, you know that you can’t follow the person in front of you too closely. If you do and they have to step through branches or thickets, when they release the branches the limbs whip back and can scratch or hit you. If you follow too closely, you can’t watch where you are going and you tend to step into potholes. The same holds true for following competitors too closely. While it’s useful and valuable to know what’s going on in the marketplace, if you find yourself falling into the “me too” trap and trying to follow your competitors too closely, you’ll end up damaging your own brand. March to the beat of your own drummer; discover your inner brilliance. When you market from your core beliefs and services rather than mimicking someone else, you’ll attract the right customers at the right time, customers who want and need what you offer. You’ll both be happier in the long run.