Understanding The Competition

When a company positions its brand in a customer’s mind, it is positioning that brand against other brands. It is critical to understand the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of each of those competitors along with the industry structure itself. (In fact, wise organizations dedicate a person to understanding the competition.)

This knowledge about your competition is necessary because you want to uniquely “own” an important benefit in your customer’s mind. Ideally, this benefit is one your competitors have not addressed and cannot easily address in the future. Better yet, the benefit you “own” should be one that takes advantage of your competitors’ “Achilles heels.”

At a minimum, you will want to collect the following information on each of your key competitors:

•    Key business objectives, goals and strategies
•    Sales, sales growth, profitability, market share and other key financial measures
•    Brand equity including, brand awareness, usage, preference, relevant differentiation, quality, value, accessibility, vitality, personality, key associations, emotional connection and loyalty
•    Product and service offerings
•    Pricing and distribution
•    Major customers
•    Corporate culture
•    Organization charts
•    Sales organization and compensation
•    Share of voice/marketing budget/advertising spend

Later in the week I intend to share more, exploring key sources of competitive information.

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Brad VanAuken The Blake Project

One comment

  • Dan Schawbel

    October 1, 2007 at 12:48 pm

    This analysis will help you create a value proposition. What do we offer that they don’t? What are the benefits?..etc etc

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