Why Rivals Become Copies

The idea in plain words

Two ice-cream sellers on a beach end up side by side in the middle, each trying not to cede any customers to the other, though customers at either end of the beach would be better served if they spread out. Two phone makers end up with the same slab of glass. Two social apps add the same stories feature. Competition is supposed to produce variety. Very often it produces sameness.

Three traditions explain why. Economics shows how rivals converge on the same position. Sociology shows how organisations imitate each other under uncertainty. And the philosopher René Girard argued that desire itself is imitative: we learn what to want by watching others want it.

Where it comes from

In 1929 the economist Harold Hotelling studied competition along a line, such as shops on a main street or sellers on a beach. He showed that two competitors tend to move towards the centre and cluster together, each capturing half the market, even though spreading out would serve customers better. He noted the same tendency in politics, where parties converge on the median voter, and in products, where competing goods become alike.

René Girard, a French literary scholar, made the deeper claim in 1961. Reading Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoevsky and Proust, he noticed that characters rarely desire things directly. They desire what a model, a rival or a hero desires. Don Quixote wants to be a knight because of the heroes in his books. Girard called this mimetic desire. When two people imitate each other’s desire for the same object, the result is rivalry, and the rivals grow alike, each a mirror of the other. Eventually the object fades in importance and the rivalry itself becomes the point.

In 1983 the sociologists Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell asked why organisations in the same field come to look so similar. They identified three pressures: coercive (regulation and powerful partners), normative (professional training and shared standards) and mimetic, which is imitation under uncertainty. When nobody knows what works, copying successful-looking organisations is a reasonable defence, and it makes the whole field converge.

What it does to the mind

Mimetic rivalry feels like strategy. A competitor’s launch arrives as urgent news; customer research arrives as slow, ambiguous data. Teams that watch competitors closely are rewarded for responsiveness. Over time, the competitor becomes the main reference point, and the question “what do customers need?” quietly turns into “what is our rival doing?”

Girard’s insight explains why such rivalries become so intense. The more two companies imitate each other, the less difference there is between them, and the more each needs to win in order to feel distinct. Rivalry escalates precisely as the products converge. Michael Porter made a related point in strategic terms: competing on the same activities, only better, leads to a contest of operational effectiveness that nobody wins, while strategy means choosing to be different.

Where it shows up

The social media essay has a section on mimetic desire in the lives of users, and describes how platforms copied features from each other. The Instagram emails show a company watching a rival with intense attention and choosing to buy rather than copy. The mobile essay traces the convergence of phones into a single form. Elop’s Burning Platform memo diagnoses Nokia as trying to compete on rivals’ terms, and choosing a different ecosystem to escape that contest.

What it asks of someone deciding

Name your model. Ask, for each major initiative, whose desire you are imitating. If the honest answer is a competitor’s, ask what the customer evidence says independently.

Compete on a different line. Hotelling’s sellers are better off spreading out. A strategy that defines its own dimension of value escapes the mirror.

Respect the objection. Copying good ideas quickly is often wise, and refusing to copy can be pride. The question is whether imitation serves a strategy of your own or has replaced one.