In this short video I give our thoughts on why marketing is like rugby (or any other team sport really).
Transcript
Hi, guys, it’s Karl here again from Buzz Website Design and Marketing. Welcome to another snippet of marketing help and ideas.
Today, I have something just a little bit unique because, yesterday, my significant other and I were in Rome watching England play Italy in the Six Nations Rugby. As often happens to me, I thought, well, there must be a parallel here with something to do with our business and our marketing. And, actually, I realized that there is.
You see, one of the keys to success on the rugby pitch is preparation, and there’s two factors that go in with this preparation.
One of them is to train to be the fittest and the best that you can possibly be, and be as skilled as you can possibly be, and to be as good a team as you can possibly be working together.Another element of it is examining your competition.
You see, before any game in any professional sport, the competitors will analyze and scrutinize their competition to see what it is that they do that makes them a success, but also to try and work out ways where they’re not so good, where there are weaknesses, where there are perhaps factors that could be exploited.
We can quite readily equate that to us in our marketing.
The way we go about doing that is to have a look around us and to see who’s doing well in our particular field. Is there’s something that they’re doing that we could quite readily take on board as our own?

When you work out that marketing is like rugby you can improve your marketing results.
Now, I’m not under any circumstances suggesting you go out and copy everybody because, if we all did that, then no one would stand out. But, the thing to remember here is what they do might be good, and it might be good for them, and it might be good for them in their market and their approach.
The next step is to think, well, how can we take that on board? Is there something that we can do to leverage that success, put our own spin on it to make it unique to us, and hopefully unique to our marketplace, and then go out and do it?
But, the other idea is to have a look at your competition and think, well, is there something that they’re not doing so well? Is there something that we do that they don’t do? Is there something that we have within our armory of marketing tactics or something unique about our business that they aren’t quite taking advantage of?
It all boils down to working on the right skills for you, looking at your competition to see what they’re doing, try and work out what they’re doing well and emulate some of it, but also analyze what your competition aren’t doing so well. Is there something in what they’re doing that you know you can do better or you know you can do differently to stand out that little bit more in your marketing?
So, I hope this little snippet has helped. I would say, go out there and have a look at your competition. Don’t spend too much time looking at your competition simply because, if you’re busy spending time looking at them, you’ll be too busy to look at your marketplace and what they’re doing. But, go out, take a look at what they’re doing well and what are they doing not so well that you can take advantage of?
So, I hope that’s been useful. Thanks for watching, and bye for now.