The flip side of our last post is sometimes a competitor is doing something intelligent.
Look at your competition not only for what NOT to do, but for:

what is so accepted that you’d better imitate it, or you’ll look weird
bright ideas you can copy or where you can do something similar

It is also common to do a complete imitation of a successful marketing campaign, not just to borrow on what they are doing right, but to try and capitalize on the brand awareness they’ve built. They see your ad and think, oh yeah, I’ve been seeing those ads, think I’ll call them.
One hazard of that is instead, you may just end up reinforcing the competition branding and the prospects end up calling them not you. They never even notice it was you, not X-Y-Z company, running the ads.