Competitor analysis

Competitor analysis is the process of evaluating your competitors to understand their strategies, strengths, and weaknesses, and to compare them to your own company. It helps you make informed decisions about your business by providing insights into the competitive landscape and identifying potential opportunities and threats.

Competitor analysis will aid you

• Improve business strategy
• Identify opportunities
• Make informed decisions
• Optimise your marketing
• Strengthen your brand
• Develop stronger competitive advantage.

The Product Design Competitor Paradox

Whilst competitor analysis is essential in new product development, over reliance can seriously harm your business.

Lack of Originality:

• Mimicry: Focus on competitors tends to develop designs which copy features or strategies creating ‘me to’ products. Rather than developing unique and innovative products and approaches.
• Stifling Innovation: Constantly focusing on competitors’ products rather than your customers’ needs create poor products and stifles creativity.

Misinterpreting Data

• Ignoring Market Trends: Focusing on purely competitor data tends to lead to overlooking broader market trends or emerging customer needs.
• Incorrect Metrics: Analysing the wrong metrics can lead to flawed conclusions and potentially harmful decisions. For example, discovering your competition are undercutting you. The kneejerk reaction is to develop a new budget product, cutting costs in a design at the expense of durability, to retain that competitive advantage. In reality your competition is probably just making less margin!
• Focus on Tactics, Not Strategy: Concentrating on competitor tactics (e.g., pricing, promotions) can obscure a deeper understanding of their overall strategies.

Time and Resource Constraints:

• Data Collection: Gathering accurate and reliable data can be time-consuming and require significant resources.This time is better spent understanding your customers and developing products focused on solving their problems.

Using competitor analysis as a part of your development process can be useful to build an initial framework and starting point. Beyond this you are opening yourselves up to creating me to products and setting off on the wrong strategy. If you want to turn competitor analysis into competitive advantage talk to us.