How to Make Competition Work for You 2026
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July 21, 2026
Competition is simply rivalry. And as much as I would love to tell you it doesn’t matter for your business, it does. As long as alternatives exist in the market for your customers, you have competition. But should it be the front and centre of your entire business strategy? Absolutely not.
A competitive strategy that gives your business an edge acknowledges that competition exists and then looks both within your operations and beyond them to find ways to position, place, and deliver your product or service as the most attractive option available. Stop watching what everyone else is doing and start working from a strategic place.
You shouldn’t be fighting against the tide. Learn how to let it work in your favour.
Know Who You Are Actually Competing With
Who is your competition?
Identifying your commitment is layered. Your competition is not only the business doing exactly what you do. It includes every alternative your customer has access to.
In 2026, that list is longer than ever. A skincare brand is not just competing with other skincare brands. It is competing with YouTube tutorials, TikTok DIY creators, and AI-powered beauty apps that recommend home remedies. A logistics company is not only competing with other couriers but also with Bolt and all the “my cousin has a car” solutions that still dominate last-mile delivery in Nigeria.
Then there is the competitive layer that most Nigerian business owners with 10-plus staff are still underestimating: the informal economy. Nigeria has approximately 39.6 million SMEs contributing 48% to GDP. Many of these are informal operators with zero overhead, extraordinary flexibility, and deep community trust. If your strategy doesn’t account for them, you are ignoring some of your most agile competition.
Your task is to map them out, thinking outside the box, especially about who your customer is currently having solve the problem.
Understand What They Actually Offer
Why do people buy from them?
Assumptions aside, knowing your competition’s offering helps you channel your energy where it counts. This exercise is not about obsessing over rivals. It is filtering. It helps you free up mental bandwidth from competitors who are simply not targeting your niche and concentrate on the ones who are.
The most important outcome here is not a list of threats. It is a clearer picture of what your customers actually value. What are they choosing when they choose a competitor: Price? Convenience? Trust? Speed? Perceived quality? In a market like Nigeria, where purchasing power is stratified across income groups and infrastructure gaps create wildly different customer experiences, the answer to this question varies dramatically depending on which end of the customer pyramid you are targeting.
This is where many Nigerian SMEs mostly lose out. They compete in the middle, where margins are thin, and loyalty is low, even though the real opportunities often lie at either end. On one hand, there is the premium customer who will pay for a guaranteed, superior experience and on the other hand, there is the mass-market customer who needs the same problem solved at a fraction of the cost; you can leverage numbers. Pick your lane deliberately.
Use AI to Do Your Competitive Intelligence
Are you ignoring the technology?
Competitive intelligence used to require expensive consultants or hours of manual research. Today, AI-driven tools powered by machine learning and predictive analytics can deliver intelligent insights that help you understand market trends, customer behaviour, and competitor positioning at a fraction of the cost they used to. As a business owner with a team, you no longer need to rely on your gut feeling alone.
Concretely, this means using AI tools to monitor how competitors are pricing, what they are saying on social media, what keywords they rank for, what their customers are complaining about, and where they are gaining traction. It means using AI-powered CRM systems to better understand your customers so you can serve them in ways no competitor currently does.
SMEs that resist comparing themselves to large corporations are right to do so because AI adoption does not require sophisticated infrastructure or large budgets. The advantage SMEs have is agility: decisions can be made quickly, processes adjusted rapidly, and lessons applied immediately.
Collaborate
Everybody is happy when they can make money together
This one still surprises people. But it is one of the most underused growth levers available to Nigerian businesses preparing to scale.
Can you harness your strengths and a competitor’s strengths to give your customers a genuinely superior experience? If yes, the conversation is worth having. Evaluate where your capabilities end and where theirs begin. Reach out. Some of your strongest competitors may be your best potential partners, particularly if you are eyeing markets beyond your current geography; you just have to know how to sell it to them.
This kind of collaboration is no longer just a strategy concept. Intra-African trade exports grew by over 13% last year, supported by new trade corridors and the initial success of AfCFTA guidelines, with Nigerian businesses already participating as key exporters across the continent. The businesses positioned to capture that growth are not going to do it alone. They will do it through strategic alliances with distributors in other markets, with complementary service providers, with logistics partners who know the last mile in Accra or Nairobi better than you do.
In an environment where neither people nor capital can move freely, high interest rates continue to make traditional bank debt expensive, and bank lending remains misaligned with business cash flow cycles, pooling capabilities with the right partner is often smarter than trying to build everything yourself.
Use Your Competition to Eliminate Your Uncertainty
One of the smartest things your competition does for you, free of charge, is validate the market. When a competitor has already proven that customers will pay for something, they have absorbed the risk of testing that assumption. You now have data.
When a competitor has already proven that customers will pay for something, they have absorbed the risk of testing that assumption. You now have data.
Think about how fintech unbundled traditional banking in Nigeria, companies like Flutterwave and OPay did not compete head-on with Access Bank or GTBank. They used digital tools to reach a wider audience, streamline operations, and solve problems that legacy institutions were too slow or too large to address. They let the established players demonstrate the demand, then moved faster and leaner to serve it differently.
You can apply this same logic at a smaller scale. Is a competitor struggling to retain customers in a particular segment? That is a signal about an unmet need. Is a competitor growing rapidly in a market you haven’t entered yet? That is validation that the market exists. Their data is your intelligence. Use it.
Competitive data is intelligence. Use It!
The Strategic Shift That Makes All of This Work
The thread connecting every strategy in this article is the same: competition, when you engage with it intelligently, is information. It tells you where the market is going. It tells you what customers will pay for. It shows you which problems remain unsolved. It reveals partners you didn’t know you needed.
The winners in this environment will be those who master macro-judgement, deploy technology to slash costs and free up human creativity, and localise value by solving uniquely African problems with global-standard thinking.
Your job is to be aware of your competitors, as “information” that fuels your planning and ability to build strategies that help you better solve problems for your clients and customers. This is what will make you stand out. Paying attention to your customers’ needs and making sure you are doing better at meeting them than your competitors.
African Export-Import Bank. (2025, July 1). Nigerian businesses leverage AfCFTA to grow the country’s intra-African trade opportunities. https://www.afreximbank.com/nigerian-business-leverage-afcfta-to-grow-the-countrys-intra-african-trade-opportunities/
AFSIC – Investing in Africa. (2024). Small and medium enterprises in Nigeria. https://www.afsic.net/small-and-medium-enterprises-in-nigeria/
Businessday NG. (2026, January 6). From insight to action: How Nigerian SMEs can start using AI this quarter. https://businessday.ng/opinion/article/from-insight-to-action-how-nigerian-smes-can-start-using-ai-this-quarter/
Businessday NG / Kreeno Consortium. (2026, February 27). Maximizing the African Continental Free Trade Area, AfCFTA rules for global expansion, as a Nigerian fast moving consumer goods, FMCG firm. https://businessday.ng/backpage/article/maximizing-the-african-continental-free-trade-area-afcfta-rules-for-global-expansion-as-a-nigerian-fast-moving-consumer-goods-fmcg-firm/
Elite Mindz. (2025, September 9). How AI-powered CRM & sales software is transforming Nigerian SMEs. https://elitemindz6.wordpress.com/2025/09/09/how-ai-powered-crm-sales-software-is-transforming-nigerian-smes/
MOHAC Africa. (2026, January 2). Small businesses in Africa: Statistics, challenges & strategies. https://mohacafrica.org/small-businesses-in-africa/
Mondaq / Templars. (2026, March 30). Bridging the gap: Financing and scaling small and medium enterprises through Nigeria’s capital market. https://www.mondaq.com/nigeria/corporate-governance/1765518/bridging-the-gap-financing-and-scaling-small-and-medium-enterprises-through-nigerias-capital-market
Nigerian Tribune / Zawya. (2025, December 31). The 2026 Nigerian entrepreneur: Scaling through stability and the digital frontier. https://www.zawya.com/en/economy/africa/the-2026-nigerian-entrepreneur-scaling-through-stability-and-the-digital-frontier-tmszqh10
