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What, why and how to do a comprehensive competitor analysis
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As product designers, we always tend to think that we understand by looking into what our client business needs and understanding what he wants would give a good product or a solution that can be the next best thing. But most of the time we tend to forget that there are other organizations, team or individuals who do the same product or solutions as us focusing down on the same the user groups and trying to give the same value proposition. that is called as competition.
<h4>Understanding competition</h4>
When we start designing our products we take less time to tackle our competition. We either think that our competition is beyond us or we don’t have competition for the most part. That’s because we don’t understand the boundaries of the marketplace we are trying to give the solution to.
When coming to market place it contains all of our excising and future customers. They can be in all the age ranges and have different types of interests. They can be paying for the product or not and can be directly involved in creating the market it self. But the point is not all of them are directly your customers. When coming to understanding your competition if you understand that not everyone in the market being your customers make you easy to pinpoint your competition
<h4>Who is a competitor?</h4>
A competitor can be an organization, a team or an individual who can share your goals and work for the same thing as you are. Most of the time when you think about a start up your idea can be already be implemented by someone else and you are in for a big fight to stand up on your feet in the market and get the upper hand over the product. But to do that you need to understand who you are up against when you get into the market.
You may have two main types of competitors that will keep you wake up at night when you start your own business.
Direct Competitors : are the ones who give the same value propositions to the user groups/customers that you are focusing on. They may focus on your exciting or future customers problems and provide solutions effectively. This may lead whom ever are spending money and time in buying and using your applications to move on and buy what your competitors are putting out even your interfaces and colors looks good.
Indirect Competitors : are the ones who will focus on the similar value preposition on a different set of user segment or focus on your user’s segments with out providing the same value preposition. In this case, the indirect competitor’s main focus is not providing a solution to the problem that you are trying to solve for your customers but its secondary services might be addressing your problem and might be solving it as well.
Well regardless whether you are having more direct or indirect competitors the best thing is to focus on finding who you are up against. To do that you need to find out about your competitors.
<h4>How to do that?</h4>
The Internet is a wonderful place where you can find things in a button click. The easiest and effective way to find your competition is though the research phase where you sit down with your clients and talk in stakeholder interviews. Most of the time the ideas are generated by inspiration. When talking with your clients or investors on the solution that you are proposing, most of the time the clients might talk about a similar type of applications that they have seen or they like about that might have a probability of having the same value preposition as yours. The other best way is to look for competitors on the internet. There can be many resources lying around on the internet if you know how to search using key words.
When you find your competitors it’s time for you to note them down on a paper or electronic document as you like. This is the first step for your competitor analysis.
Defining Assessment Criteria
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When coming to assessment criteria most of the time we rush into things as we think is correct and spend time collecting information which is not relevant to the hypothesis that we may come along during the audit. What we should do is to mitigate issues by sitting down and discussing what we need to put into criteria and what you should not.
In any case we would look into purpose of the application, primary categories, has the application being marketed on social media, what are their content types, dose they allow reviews by their customers, what are the key functions that the application has the competitive advantage over other applications, Dose the application provides customization and other things that relevant to your business domain. When you clear up what needs to be placed as your assessment criteria.
Gathering your Materials
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You might wonder why we need this to happen. Gathering or finding materials is one of the key things that you have to do when you are conducting a competitor analysis. In this phase we need to collect URL’s of the competitors, if the competitors are having mobile applications we need to download them from app -store or google play or any other platform that provide mobile applications. If you are willing to look at these applications via simulators it’s better to download them and set your environment up.
Start Reviewing In this phase we start reviewing the competitors against the criteria we have made. For that you can either create a spreadsheet or you can user a paper and a pen to write down your findings. We call it a Competitive analysis Matrix.
<img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2u8b9X7">Competitive analysis Matrix.
When you are done with the review you are in to making out the meaning of the raw data that you have collected during the review.
Analyze your findings
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Have you ever tried to eat a big chocolate bar with one bite? well if you have done it you are extremely talented in eating food. But what most of the people do is take the chocolate bar and take it down to many waves of peace so it is easy to consume it. The simple meaning of analysis is to break down the finding into small actionable bites so we can breakdown the bigger problem into small peace and work on them with your team so the big picture will not haunt the outcome of your findings.
To do a analysis there are four basic steps
<ol>
<li>Scan and skim your raw data for highs and lows</li>
<li>Create logical grouping on comparisons</li>
<li>Analyze each competitor by product benchmarking product attributes and best practices</li>
<li>Documenting your findings</li>
</ol>
Scan and skim your raw data for highs and lows It’s quite a different technique for most of the people since we try to read everything on the document we create to get an idea. But by reading everything we consume a lot of time. Skimming is a technique where you move your eyes quickly over the text to get the gist of what is written or typed and scanning is a method where you cover a huge area of data while looking into the specific type of information which is more relevant. By doing that we can identify quantitive and qualitative data.
qualitative data shows descriptive and subjective information such as emotions, reactions, opinions made by the users. This information can not be easily measured
Quantitive data in the other hand can be measured since they are numbers and statistics such as application downloads, application visits, search traffic, members available and so on.
Looking into these data might be a stressful thing since you might have to remember each of the point and where to look to find the data again and again. So to avoid time waste we can color code each and every point we find interesting. Keeping a color to note good points and another color to keep weak points noted on each and every competitor will give you added advantage on what points to look at a glance.
Create logical grouping on comparisons : When you go through the data you will find common features that are in your competitor’s products. You have to organize the details on the common features that you may find and group them. In here the key idea is to focus down on the features that your competitors may have that give them the competitive advantage over you and others. This will allow you to understand how and why other products are better sellers and successful than you and others.
Analyze each competitor by product benchmarking product attributes and best practices
Benchmarking is a business word that use to help organizations to identify and examine key facts so the comparisons can be made. This analysis leads to reducing costs, optimizing the sales funnel, and improving the product so that it delivers more value to the target customer. When we look into our competitors we look in to how our competitors have tackled the problems in hand that we are facing and how they have given the solution to that particular problem. Then you will be able to see that most of the organizations have used same and similar types of patterns. They can be either extremely successful or either can be flush down the market trends. Then you will be able to see overlooking factors by other organizations that would generate your value innovation. This will be the best opportunity to find out your value by innovating or improving the UX best practices by looking into other’s models and find where you can put the value into your product.
Documenting your findings Finding most of this information can be a hard thing and most hard part is to document your findings. Because every time you start writing there will be something new coming into your mind as output for your analysis. So before hand write down all the key factors and then move on to them one by one. This document will help you to shape your rational on your findings and recommendations. Make it an easy to read summery and tell how to move forward with the findings you may have in your hand. The document can be given to your client and to your team to understand what you have found out during the competitor analysis.
I understand that many organizations dive into the deep end and then find out what’s going around them. but its always better to look into the depth of the pool before you jump in.
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Why we look in to competition in products

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