The Competitive Environment is, perhaps, the most important of the 6 Environments that influence a company involved in marketing, business,  international business or e-commerce. 

The degree to which one attends to the "other" environments is a consequence of the intensity of the Competitive Environment.

• copying your product and knocking off your designs,
• selling below your price, 
• using some of your advertising themes and concepts
• paying better wages to employees,
• sell a slightly different product that can be substituted for your's,

therefore it will be necessary to

• utilize every resource in the technological environment, 
• attend to all the language and gender and age considerations of the social/cultural environment 
• carefully analyze trends in the economic environment
• monitor political movements and upcoming changes in the regulatory environment
• prepare contingencies for threats from weather extremes and  the geographic environment,

then 

• you don't have to use the latest technology, because your customers will not be drawn to anybody else, and you can therefore save money
• you do not have to worry about paying money for having marketing material translated into different languages for the Social/Cultural Environment
• you can charge a higher price because whether the Economy is good, or bad, does not matter - absence of competition mean that if people want your product, they have to buy it from you and pay whatever price you charge
• you do not have to monitor changes to laws and regulations in such a detailed  way and can probably save money on legal fees
• you do not have to watch for weather or climatic problems cause if they do delay your shipping or sales, it doesn't matter cause customers can't buy from other suppliers anyways

Who?

Business competitors are:

• Other organizations offering the same product or service now 
• Other organizations offering similar products or services now 
• Other organizations offering a variation on a product or service, that you cannot
• which could be because 3rd party vendors make accessory items, or "apps" for you, or your competition
• which could be because you did not update your software to follow trends
• Organizations that could offer the same or similar products or services in the future 
• Organizations that could remove the need for a product or service we sell

 

obvious

• which could be because 3rd party vendors make accessory items, or "apps" for you, or your competition

• which could be because you did not update your software to follow trends

Atlanta based software firm AirWatch LLC provides enterprise software that allows large companies to handle permissions and encryption on employees smartphones - something that previously could only be done on Blackberries, can now be down by AirWatch on androids, iOS, Samsung and Windows smartphones. "AirWatch is king of what is called MDM - Mobile Device Management - companies in the business of securing data on office issued devices". Big accounts like Yahoo! and the Pentagon have dumped Blackberries and now let their employees use androids and iPhones which applow the employees to download more apps - at the same time as allowing the employer to have customized restrictions and encryption.

AirWatch has grown from 350 to 900 workers in 2011-2012 !!
see the full story at  www2.macleans.ca/2013/01/07/the-company-thats-killing-rim/

• not so obvious
• like Rogers video stores getting into the cell phone market to compete w Bell Mobility
• Polaroid cameras being eclipsed by digital cameras

• Honda - in the beginning no threat cause they made motorcycles - but when they moved to North America, they began to make small cars
• Rogers - known as a cell phone company competing with the cell phone division of Bell - then Rogers entering the "home phone" market to compete with Bell in a way in which Bell previously had no competition

Apple executives may have been wondering how much competition they would get from R.I.M.'s tablet, but what about Amazon, which was originally a website selling music and books online, and has morphed into a company that also sells a device (to read eBooks), which then means Amazon becomes a competitor in the market for electronic devices using web-based applications.
 

the new (2011) Apple iPad 5 - which also requires additional purchases of accessories which cost several hundred eg. protective case/cover, bluetooth keyboard see  http://www.pcworld.com/article/235989/ apples_ipad_5_reasons_why_ill_never_buy_one.html	The Amazon Kindle Fire At $199, it's $300 cheaper than the least expensive iPad 2

Big difference between the iPad5 and the Kindle Fire is not the physical products' features (With a 7-inch screen, Kindle Fire is a good bit smaller than iPad 2 and its 9.7-inch display.), or their FABs, it is the zillions of apps that are written for Apple products and can be downloaded and used on iPhones and iPads.

Future - Direct Competition - maybe not in 2011 cause the smaller screen on the Kindle means customers may still prefer to the iPad 5, BUT, some industry experts say 
 informationweek.com/news/hardware/handheld/231602330 
that with profits from the Kindle Fire, Amazon will launch a 10" version in mid-2012 which will definitely be an iPad Killer.

• not obvious at all, but really important to know who is going to make you extinct
• like the internet removing the need for encyclopedia's
• like www.canada411.ca removing the need for "white pages"

When I bought my Garmin eTrex GPS in 2008 I carried it with my everywhere logging in points of interest and using the maps to locate my position. When I got my newest BlackBerry in the summer of 2010 - which included GPS functionality, + Bluetooth, + some map apps, I almost stopped using the Garmin completely. WTGR

When I got the Garmin Nuvi in Nov 2010, I bought the model with Bluetooth. When my BlackBerry is turned on, the address book in my BlackBerry can be seen on the screen of the Garmin, allowing me "hands free" phoning - so I threw away my Bluetooth headset.

Sometimes an "entity" that could remove the need for one of your products or services can be found within your corporation - if this is the case, we sometimes refer to that circumstance as cannabilization.
see  witiger.com/ecommerce/cannibalization.htm 

• Bell - cannabilizing it's own products - popularity of cell phones among young customers leading to a decline in young people obtaining land lines for phones when they get their first apartment

There are also many situations when your competition, (direct and indirect) can make a bad mistake, or can have some problem, and this can conversely be good for your business.

A simple scenario can be your competition has a problem producing the product (which directly competes with one of your models) and all of a sudden you have an increase in customer demand (not because you did something right) because the available supply from your competition has dried up.

Being prepared for a possibility like this is important because if you can take advantage of it and satisfy those customers, they may end up staying with you and not return to the competition when the competition fixes the problem they had.

So, this type of "contingency planning" could be called "if the other guy screws up" planning.

Jared Lindzon wrote a piece in the Toronto Star about cyber attackers targeting smart phones. Quoting Tom Kellerman of Trend Micro, Lindzon explains that "the most prolific and viable attacks on small businesses in 2013 will be through mobile platforms".

Noted: Android's operating system is the poorest - partly because Google publicly released details of the OS - which made it easier for "bad guys" to build hacking tools.

Kellerman says “The most secure operating system for mobility is by far Blackberry"

Obviously this is an opportunity for other handset manufacturers using different operating systems accessing different maps, to point out that "ours does not..."

Apple "dumped Google's maps because the search giant refused to offer iPhone users features such as turn-by-turn navigation. But problems quickly emerged with the detail in the maps, which omitted a number of locations and mislabeled others compared with the product that had gone before"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/dec
/10/apple-maps-life-threatening-australian-police

In October [2012], chief executive Tim Cook issued a public apology for the poor quality of the maps and soon after fired the head of the iOS 6 software group, Scott Forstall. The head of the mapping group is also reported to have been fired in November [2012]" 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/dec
/10/apple-maps-life-threatening-australian-police

4th week of Sept 2013 Maclean's published an article 
 www2.macleans.ca/2013/09/26/chinas-apple-clone/ 
by Rosemary Westwood discussing how a Chinese cellphone company, Xiaomi (pronounced Shao Mee) is selling well, and priced much lower than the Apple iPhone and much much lower than Korea's Samsung S4.
 

click on the screen capture to the right to hear WTGR's comments about this story.