Competitor Research: Using market research to win in your Competitive Environment
Competitive positioning – what are your business objectives?
The start of any research is to understand where you want the business to be.
What products and features,
what positioning in the market,
what sort of price point.
Any business imperatives to satisfy?
This helps define ‘where you want to play’ and ‘what you want to achieve’.
What is your precise product?
You also need to define what your product or service actually is. What features etc.
What is the problem your product or service solves?
This will define what sort of competitors you will be up against.
As part of the researching your competitive landscape it is really useful to be able to understand what aspect of your product or service is actually driving perceived value.
Competitive landscape research
The big items you need to cover include:
Identify potential competitors: standard players, disruptors, new entrants …
Assess their strategy, analyse their risk to you
Identify competing products, looking at
USPs and features
Pricing
Sales and Marketing
Market share
Customer (and market in general) feedback
General market trends
Geographic, supply, or regulatory issues
Competitive landscape – market feedback
Do your desk research!
Loads of info is in public domain
Websites, press releases, articles, case studies, even use glassdoor!
But its likely you will need to get market feedback of some sort. Survey the market or customers to find out new information:
Needs and ‘pain points’
Views on existing providers in the market – likes and dislikes!
Views on pricing, costs etc
Views on emerging needs
Maybe also test out your USPs as well!
Define USPs to meet market trends
Create a structured analysis (eg standard SWOT or similar)
Find attractive gaps in the market
Define your USPs to suit
Make sure these align with how the market is changing
new products (disruption or gradual evolution)
what customers want
price sensitivity
regulatory changes
Technology changes
Review this regularly!
Choose where to play – and win
With this set of detailed information, you have:
Assessed the competition
Gathered key market feedback
Identified viable commercial gaps in the market you can fill
Make your choices based on knowledge.
Implement to win!