Competitor analysis

Summary

Competitor analysis identifies the strengths and weaknesses of competing products or services before starting work on prototypes. A 10 minute tour of each of 4 to 10 of the most popular competing products showing how typical tasks are achieved is presented to a half day meeting of stakeholders. The competitive advantages of each product are discussed, and a short summary of the market position is generated at the end of the meeting. Alternative methods are market surveys or lab tests of competitor products

Benefits

• To discover the strengths and weaknesses of competing products or services,
• to develop a list of issues that need to be addressed in order to compete effectively
• to gain consensus among a group of project stakeholders.

This method may also result in a list of desirable features that the new product could include.

Method

Planning

The main objective of the planning phase is to obtain access to four to ten competitor products.

The first question is always: what is a competitor? A context of use analysis of the intended product is important as it will identify the users, the tasks, and the context in which the product is planned to be used. A product is a way of satisfying a user need. A fundamental mistake in competitor analysis is to focus on the enabling technology and not on the user need to be serviced. What products or services are already on the market which satisfy the user need you are interested in?

If you are dealing with web-based products or products advertised on the web then a useful methodology is as follows:

• obtain a set of keywords which describe the service you intend to offer
• search the web using at least ten different search engines with this set of keywords
• make a list of the top ten sites from the results of the different search engines

If your results are too diffuse (i.e., there are no clear winners) then your set of terms is most probably too vague. If your results are too clear cut (i.e., all the search engines agree) then your set of terms is most probably too conventional.

This method is useful for identifying not only web based but also desktop products. However, using it for identifying desktop products only results in a list of products; using it for websites results in a list of URLs (some of which may require registering to access).

If the products cannot be identified on the web then you must use conventional search and current awareness techniques to identify the competitors: look in the latest trade magazines for instance.

It is also useful to ask domain experts or the marketing department to review the list of competitor products to ensure that the most important competitors are represented.

This stage ends when you have acquired access to the most popular competitor products (i.e. if they are software you have to purchase them and possibly also get licenses; if they are web sites you may need passwords for some of them.)

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16