Understanding the Competitive Landscape

Creating an effective growth strategy involves identifying your competitors and the opportunities to position your product or service in the market. As with any research methodology, the first step is understanding key research questions. The following are some examples of questions that help define the roadmap for your competitive analysis:

Who are the competitors that sell a similar product or service within the same market? In other words, your direct competitors. For example, Toyota is a direct competitor of Ford Motor because they both sell cars for the same customer segments.
Who are the competitors that sell a different product or service but fulfill similar customer needs? In other words, your indirect competitors. For example, Netflix is an indirect competitor of Activision Blizzard because they both cater to the entertainment need of customers.
What are the relevant strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of each competitor you’ve identified? Which is known as the SWOT analysis.
What is the pricing strategy of each competitor?
What are their customers saying about their product or service?
Are they attracting any positive or negative media attention?
What is the professional background of their management members, and how long have they been serving in that specific management role?
How many employees do they employ, and what are they saying about the company?
How much traffic does their website generate monthly, and what is the source of that traffic?
How broad is their product or service range?
Where are their headquarters, and do they have physical locations?
Who are their strategic partners?
How many social media followers do they have for every major social media network?
What is their value proposition?
What are they writing in their advertisements?
How high do they appear on the results page of a search engine like Google or Bing?
Did they recently announce any upcoming product or service?
Did they raise funding, and if so, how much did they manage to raise and when?
What is their area of expertise?

These questions can serve as the basis for a comprehensive competitor analysis, and probably the most important aspect of this analysis is to identify where your business is positioned in the analyzed competitive landscape and what opportunities are in front of you right now to be able to utilize competitive advantages and become the preferred option for your customers in your category.

If you require assistance in the competitive analysis for you product or service,