Onur Cobanli explains:
If you are in a competitive marketplace, if you are able to benchmark yourself in comparison to your peers and competitors, you inherently will have a desire to push yourself to become better that is because for most people their self-worth comes from their social standing, and peer recognition and that is perhaps healthy feeling for a social species. On the other hand, a different mechanism applies for companies and enterprises; in their case when there are competitors, it becomes harder to sell their existing offerings since competitors would come up with superior offerings at similar prices; this pushes companies to either exit the market or to create new superior offerings, these new superior offerings then push the competitors to create even newer even more superior designs, there is an endless market push for innovation, in the end, regardless of you want or not, you have achieved better, either because you benchmarked yourself with better people or because of market flow.