How to read your competitors like a book
How do you glean the right set of insights & read your competitors like it were to be a book?
Yes, this is the era of Gen-AI where any question however clear / ambivalent / fuzzy / trivial / sophisticated could be popped to via a prompt over something of a chatbot & one could have those answers flow in & in numbers as well, sans much of an effort. And that also justifies the existence of the term “prompt engineering” which also happens to be a position in some orgs today.
When it comes to orgs / business in general & products in particular is all about “doing the right things at the right time” just as much as Bill Gates mentions over his book “The Road Ahead”. Deciphering that quote, you’d perhaps be right to think that one could do all the right things but still end up on the wrong side if the timing is wrong, which it to say they may not grow to potential even if don’t happen to lose the plot entirely.
But is it possible that I hit the same chatbot with a question like:
What’s the direction my competitor (x)’s product has taken & what’s been their focus in the recent past / going to be in near time?
An org. conscious about their performance vis-à-vis the other competitors in the market is bound to carry this question even before they invest a single penny into building the product. And when not getting too worried, one ought to be keep a watchful eye on, a close tab on the competition with an ulterior motive that’s to study their motivations, decipher the direction they plan to take over their forthcoming launches, try & map those initiatives / layers of the strategy to their goals. After-all one wants to reach pole position & stay there for as long as possible over gaining market share & it is all done in healthy competition.
If we were to be in the 1990s we have had a whole assortment of channels to track & that could have looked like milking an ox / bull. The one primary reason I say that is how most channels were designed to hit the target audience F2F at random places & to determine exactly which channel is working for an org, could have taken a toll on those analytics teams (if they were present back in the day).
“I have heard of how some orgs. existed in the past (also the recent past as much as the latter 2000s) whose sole purpose of existence was to go hand & foot in the market pervasively asking questions F2F to random people & building something of a database of responses vis-à-vis a product / an org. These orgs. were known to charge their clients pretty dearly, sometimes as blatant as [$ per record]”
But thankfully we are on this side of the spectrum today with everything going digital, making it straightforward to track each & every move someone makes when their browsing online / over those sessions with the product. Although what one is looking to track & how they build some sense around it could be down to the case in particular, here are a few insights one could (/should) gain when they dig into their competition. Let’s deep dive into each of these headers…
1. Demographics
It all starts with the audience & allotting time towards building an understanding of their persona, their motivations & emotions behind those choices / decisions they make about adopting products into their lives or not. So, to get there one’d obviously have to cover these individual stubs:
Who are they targeting?
What age groups do the audience belong to?
Are they targeting a specific section / geography or keeping it entirely generic?
2. Budget allocation
The size of the purse does dictate a lot over the strategic choices defining (/ sometimes curbing) the moves one could make over conceptualizing / ideating & taking their products / features from 0-1. So, one ought to obtain enough clarity over those budgets which ought to be down to finding answers to these questions:
How much have they spent & may spend on advertising going ahead?
What’s the average runtime of those ads? How is the ad faring amongst the markets in general & the targeted user groups / segments in particular?
What’s their sole urpose of running the ads, the end goal of the ad so to speak?
What’s been their viewership over the last few instances of releasing these ads?
Can we get a hang of the probability of conversion over those ads?
Have they been able to achieve the results they were looking for? If yes, by what percentage?
3. Advertising channels
Yes, the word “social” means much more than just the dictionary definition & it has revolutionized the way one looks at promotions off-late. And there are tons of channels one could think of as fitting under that “social” banner. Exactly which one an org. chooses & the rationale behind choosing it could be far from easy & simple, but it could be worth its weight in gold if one could perceive that decision & be able to decipher its rationale:
Across what channels are they currently advertising?
What are their most preferred channels chosen / earmarked for advertising?
Have they dropped a few of those channels, shortening that list in the recent past? If yes, why?
Can we arrive at a suitable reasoning behind prioritizing that one channel as default?
4. Messaging and branding
Often times the one thing goes wrong with orgs. & products is that superficial lens they see it all with, which happens to differ from the way the others / the market perceives it. The messaging employed does stand testimony to the branding & positioning of the products & the org. in the market, understanding which ought to be mandatory when it comes to studying the competition & to be able to do it well one ought to have answers to these questions:
How have they chosen to position their org. in general & their product in particular?
What does their messaging predominantly convey? Is that underlining that one specific niche / area with a super-sharp focus or is that firing all over the place trying to cover a wide array of things?
Does the messaging over those adverts remain constant across the board or do they vary based on the persona / individual use cases?
5. Creative assets
There is a whole undeniable correlation between the way the campaigns / messaging has been presented & the way the audience tends to perceive it, which also underlines the close correlation between those design & marketing teams. Although there is a strong onus on the messaging / copywriting the one thing still stands-out as for many of those adverts is the creativity across all those marketing assets, analysing which ought to be mandatory. One could achieve that by understanding:
How easy is it for one to perceive the messaging & understand how products fit in to their lives by analysing the assets – branding, graphics - animation / visuals, copies, CTAs etc.?
What is the overall quality of each of those individual assets?
What might have been the focus of those teams en route to building those assets? What’s the level of brainstorming it may have taken to arrive at the consistency that’s evident now?
6. Performance metrics
Floating ads of any type is just the first step in the funnel. What happens after is what usually spills the beans over the success of the campaigns, which is obviously tracked even when talks of start-up orgs today. To conduct a complete study of a competitor one ought to have ticked all these boxes:
How have their campaigns / ads faring / how have they been performing overall?
What does the average viewer seem to like about the whole Ad? Is that liking carried beyond the visual element (graphics, colours, video, animation etc.)?
What are the prospects who have converted / moved one step further in the funnel (say, sign-up) saying about the very same Ad? What is it that triggered the conversion & how contagious is that?
7. Emerging trends
The trends are always so crucial, they could be enough to make / break a campaign / product launch / org. as a whole. When ignoring trends could be detrimental reading wrongly into them, not gleaning the right insight could prove to be way more dangerous. Whether the competitor is aligned with what the trendlines ought to say or not is again a valuable piece of information one shouldn’t ignore, given how reaching there could be done by asking:
What are the latest trends in this market space in general / products in particular?
Given the ads, has the org. managed to stay in-line with those trends? What other signals can be gleaned from them as for uniqueness, like say the use of AI for a highly specific cause / niche?
Is the org. trying to set a new trend of its own? If yes, how’s that catching up with the market given their runtime over a certain cadence?
8. Opportunities for differentiation
“Innovate or die” happens to be a default mantra for orgs. especially start-ups today. Given that scenario, it is quite possible that an org. may have ideated well over their upcoming products & spent enough time & money over valuating it all vis-à-vis the markets just as much. So, how unique is the competitor’s product is one aspect worth spending time over, which could be achieved by finding answers to these questions:
Does the org. / brand / product stand out? What’s the aura around them?
Can the USP of the product be clearly established? What’s it?
What’s the probability of a possible monopoly here? Does the product have it to take the market by a storm & if not, what would it take / what’s missing?
Given the dynamism in the market off-late, it may not suffice to analyse just one of the competitors, the one who is top of the pile, it becomes very crucial to spend time analysing what all the others are doing, the so-called “competition to the competition”.
Most orgs. aggressively take to those campaigns over their social media handles well before the launch of a product, which is also something of a norm given the need to build awareness over a targeted sample space / market segment. And that also ought to be enough to glean an insight or two about the future course of their products & also the strategic direction the org. plans to take. And it’s all down to finding the right answers to a few good questions.
Let’s try & cover a few practical use cases so as to help understand the right ways to decipher it all…
CASE 1: Pivoted on to B2B from B2C
If an org. shifted focus from B2C & headed over to target B2B, there could be a bundle of thigs to track like:
Why did they shift to B2B?
Did they entirely drop B2B? If yes, why?
How has it impacted the frontline metrics?
What’s the competition to the competition doing?
CASE 2: Shifted focus to a nuanced segment in B2C
Suposing an org. quickly launches some specific feature so as to target a nuanced market segment over B2C, there could be a few deep reasons behind that as well, which could be gleaned from questions like:
What prompted the shift in focus?
What does the persona look like here?
What’s the nuance covered here?
What’s the competition to the competition doing?
CASE 3: Targeting a new geography altogether
Now suppose a case where an org. jumped the gun & moved onto target an entirely new geography with a same / variant of the same / entirely new product. That could lead to one stumbling on a boiling pot of strategic insight over these questions:
Is it the same product tailored to the new geography / a fresh one entirely?
Is the customer segment the same as it was here?
What was the market position / share of the org. in the local market just before they made the switch?
Did they experience some friction / problems with the user groups they were targeting?
What does the org. plan to do with the product in the local market?
In Conclusion…
No doubt, your competitors are your threat &perceiving it that way is a given, also conventional thinking. But analysing all of the competition so as to glean enough insight over their strategic moves, goals, product / feature launches, targeted market segments is unmissable & imperative if one’s talking about building a product. In fact, that’s also one of the parameters advisors use to test / understand the preparedness of the founders / cofounders.