When you're trying to start a business and create your own identity that is compelling and unique from your competition, you might be tempted to copy: Copy another company's brochures, logo, font choices, and the way you run things. After all, if it's working for the other company, it should work for you too, right? Wrong.

If you can't come up with ideas for your brand on your own, you can look to other companies to get ideas. There's nothing wrong with that. And with so many businesses around, it's hard not to look like someone and you can't research all the companies in the world. But you can research your competition and get ideas from them. You don't want to be known as the #2 company, doing everything after the #1 company does it. That never works!

If one company is doing an activity, like newsletter printing and you think it'd be beneficial you're your customers if you had a newsletter, that's fine. You can't really "copy" an activity like that. But there are other areas where you might be tempted to copy (and it can only be labeled as copying) your competition, but you should resist the temptation:

Stay away from design and layout of marketing materials. The whole point of creating a brand is to differentiate yourself from your competition. If you copy a competitor's marketing materials, more likely than not, consumers will mistake your materials for the other companies. It's fine to take ideas that are really design principles, like using white space, or using a primary photo for the front of your brochures. But don't copy the exact design and layout.

Stay away from the style of writing. Again, you're just going to sound like the competition if you do this and that's not the goal of branding. Your copy should reflect the personality of your company and product, not someone else's personality.

Stay away from the primary colors of your competition. Every brand should have one primary color that is used on all marketing materials. Target uses red. UPS uses brown. Pick one color that none of your competition uses as their primary and adopt it as your own. Make sure that the color accurately reflects your brand. For example, if you have a relaxing product, use a light blue, not a bright pink.

Don't rhyme your name with your competitor or even go anywhere close to sounding like their name. Also, try to avoid using the same first letter as your competition. Using "AAA Clothing" might put you ahead of "ABC Clothing" in the phone book, but it sounds too similar and people might get you mixed up.

Remember, it's okay to get ideas from competitors, but it's not okay to copy them because your company is different and you need to show that. Besides, you don't know the reasoning for their choices, and you shouldn't make major branding decisions based on what your competitor does.

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