Market research is an important exercise.
You should know:
- What people have
- What people would like to have
- What people need (not the same as above)
- What is on offer (in the market)
- How it is offered
There’s probably a more scientific way of presenting those ideas, but you should get the general idea.
In the hosting market it is not uncommon to contact competitors to seek quotes for various services simply to see how other people are presenting their services and products. After all, when it boils down to it, a domain is still a domain. You can call it what you like, but it’s not going to change what it is.
I was rather amused, but slightly bemused, when we received two almost identical RFPs in the space of 12 hours. One arrived. I read it and was dealing with it. When the second one arrived I was hit with a sense of deja vu. Hadn’t I read the same request only a couple of hours earlier? Maybe I was imagining things.
No. I wasn’t.
Putting them side by side the only differences were minor punctuation and stylistic differences (3 or 4 elements to be
precise).
Smelling a rat I checked the headers, as did a couple of our technical staff.
You would think that they’d have at least tried to hide their origin. Nope. The IP in the header was the competitor’s office mail server, with customised SMTP flag and all!!
Moral of the story.
Don’t send emails to competitors from your office IP.
