How To Defend Your Market from Cheap Imports

Say you have good business and all of sudden you find your sales dropping because your customers prefer cheap imports.  If you are like most USA businesses, you learn to hate foreigners because of your foolish actions.  The common foolish action is to go to our Government for help competing with cheap imports.  You can easily defeat cheap imports, but there are a few steps and a proper attitude to take.  Here is how.

1. Respect your customers.  They know the difference, they make a choice.  Respect that.  But find out when your customers tell you no, they will not reorder, ask them "how come?"  "Why" is too strong a term.  Use "how come?' They will tell you how come, so you will then know. Wrong shape, speed, color, function, material or something.  You may be surprised it is not, as you thought "low price" at all.  Even if the competitors price is lower, you'll find that is not the reason they prefer the foreign supply.  It will be another reason, having to do with design.

2.  Think of it as a personal matter, that your customers reject you (since they do, you are the business.) You'll need to embrace the fact your customers are rejecting you personally, because you have not listened to their needs. Change that, winning is likely to be a matter of some self-transformation.

3. This may or may not apply to you, but abandon any and all intellectual property rights.  Your competitors are beating you without intellectual property rights.  Your reliance on monopoly instead of obedience is delusional.  Strip down to fighting weight.  Open source any and all intellectual property rights you own.

4. Research the worldwide trade in your product.  This you can do on your own for free, and I have covered it in 1,000 places.  Email if you want reference to this.  But know what is going on in your industry worldwide, not just USA.

5. Your market has spoken, they do not care for your work, your ethics, your way of doing business.  Learn why they prefer foreigners to you.  Study the preferred supplier worldwide.  Learn why it is, people prefer that supplier.  Adjust where necessary.  See  # 4.

6.  Instead of fighting an importer who is selling foreign produced products to your customers, become the importer who is selling foreign produced products to your customers.  As you satisfy your customers with superior products, you can learn why people prefer those to yours.  This allows you breathing time to fix your obviously broken business.

7.  The best time to do this is before "cheap imports" impacts your business.  Study now the world trade in your product area, as I show you to do so at no cost to you, and then you can begin to adjust before it is a problem.  You can make money as you learn to improve your business, before you find yourself behind.

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