In business, the answer is that it’s easier to stay on top than to get there.
Becoming a market leader, the measurement choice of marketing success, takes a long time, money and effort. You have to introduce your brand to the marketplace, spend resources on communicating your identity and coming up with all sorts of attack plans to get more marketshare at your competitors’ expense while protecting your customer base.
Retaining leadership on the other hand can be simplified if this principle is kept in mind: people go elsewhere where a better and/or different choice is available.
In other words, your job is to keep on improving on your product or service to make your current customers or clients happy and hence loyal. If a competitor launches a product or service that seems promising, you should not be ashamed in adapting it to your business. Business is not art and refusing to copy what works can cost you your top spot.
Think about it, if you constantly remove the reasons for your customers to defect, they will not. Now, good luck to the competitors who will try to unseat you. If you play your game well, they will never be able to.
