Competitive Landscape
Overview
Understanding your competitors and your relative positioning to them is critical to crafting a unique selling proposition for your target customer segments. Here a few frameworks and tactics to help you understand your competitive landscape and determine how to position your company.
What pain point are you best at solving for your customers? Define this and communicate it crisply and clearly.
What are the key features that customers are looking for (or are sensitive to)? Combine 2 features at a time and make them the axes on a 2x2 matrix, then plot your competitors relative to your company to see where you land. Once you identify some features that put you in a relatively better position than your competitors, use that as a differentiator.
Identify key pain points for your customer-industry segment and describe how your product or service addresses those pain points - these are uniqe selling propositions (USPs). If you don’t address those key pain points, then put it on your roadmap!
Secret shopping: if you have a DTC product or service, go to your competitor and purchase their product. If you have a B2B product or service, go through the purchasing process to better understand what your competitors are doing.
SWOT Analysis; what are your internal Strengths and Weaknesses? What are your external Threats and Opportunities?
Porter’s 5 Forces Analysis: understand your position in your market to inform your strategies.
Check out this example competitor landscape prepared for a previous company.
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