Practical Pieces

A few days ago a friend of mine asked me for some advice on how to cope with unfair competition in a certain region of the country. It was the common situation – bad-mouthing in front of clients, speculating with prices, lying about the products’ qualities, providing wrong information about who is the official representative of a foreign producer and so on.

While preparing my advice to his sales people, I asked the omniscient Google to find the exact phrases:
–    “нелоялна конкуренция” (in Bulgarian)– 82 200 occurrences
–    “unfair competition” – 3 440 000 occurrences

Then I put some efforts to calculate the correlation of these results to the number of people speaking the corresponding language – about 433 million people with English as their mother tongue (to make it easier I included only USA, Canada, Great Britain and Australia), and 7.3 million Bulgarians.

It turns out that “нелоялна конкуренция” (the phrase in Bulgarian) appears 14 times more often than the phrase in English in terms of the number of people speaking the corresponding language as their mother tongue, taking into account the inaccuracy of “the sample” (in fact, the English speaking people are much more)!

So, why do Bulgarian people speak about unfair competition 14 times more often than do English speaking people? Maybe because it is more common in Bulgaria…? Or because traditionally we tend to blame others for our own failures…? You might think of yet another reason or even decide to go deeper and find in what context the phrase appears☺

I think there is no sense in speaking about “unfair competition”! Competition assumes a conflict of interests in which each participant acts according to its own understanding of ethics, morale, abiding the law and sticking to agreements. People differ and so does the way they act; they think they do something in the right way even though the others might blame them as unfair competitors.

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