Your competitors influence how your customer behaves.
On one end, if you're the only producer of a product and it's patent-protected, you're going to attract all of the customers who need and can afford the product. You have a lot of flexibility to do what you want without losing too many customers.
On the other end, if you sell a commodity product that 1,000s of other stores sell, you're at the customer's mercy. You'll probably end up in a race to the bottom with price which can cause you to spend less on cost areas.
Don't feel you have to follow and copy what a competitor does. If you didn't you'd always be playing catch-up.
Instead build your own plan and execute on it. Adapt it to how your customers behave and major (mis)steps competitors make.
Just don't ignore competitors completely.
You might end up ignoring your customers.
If you're having problems with customers defecting to competitors, Repeat Customer Insights might help uncover why that's happening. Using its analyses you can figure out how to better target the good customers and let the bad ones go elsewhere.
Eric Davis
Get a complete view of your customer behavior
The cohort analysis in Repeat Customer Insights will automatically build cohorts for all of your customers. It has the ability to go back through your entire store history so you can get a complete view of your customer behavior.