Competitive Product Analysis
Since every business wants to believe that their products are the best, a competitive product analysis is a critical tool to figure out where your products stand among the competition. This article will walk you through the process so that your products can stand out among the rest.
What Does a Competitive Product Analysis Look Like?
The competitive product analysis process has become increasingly popular among business owners looking to optimize their products. As more businesses are turning to competitive intelligence to inform their business strategy, it’s important that you also take a closer look at the individual products you’re offering. You’ll want to know how they measure up to the competition.
You’ll need to investigate the competitor’s products and your own products from all angles. A competitive product analysis should be a thorough investigation of the strengths and weaknesses of both products to give your organization insight into how to improve. There are even a wide variety of free competitive product analysis templates available online to keep your findings organized.
A competitive product analysis should be part of a broader SWOT analysis that evaluates your business’s overall strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It can be hard to focus on your weaknesses, but it’s a critical step to make sure you aren’t overlooking fixable shortcomings. It’s important, though, that you take the next step to more closely examine your products, or else specific product improvements can get lost in such a broad analysis.
Businesses worldwide are recognizing how important a competitive product analysis is for success. The competitive intelligence professionals at Archintel can help you along every step of the way to gather insight that your business can translate into tangible results.
Strategies You Can Use to Complete a Competitive Product Analysis
A competitive product analysis can help you identify your priorities and make sure you’re not trailing the competition. Not sure where to start? Here are some of the top ways you can compare your products to the competition:
Undergo a self-assessment of your own products
It’s easy to judge the competitor’s products. It can be harder to objectively evaluate your own. Your first step should be to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your own products. Do you offer an impressive variety? Could you use higher quality materials? Are you missing important features?
These are important questions to get you thinking about what you have to offer. It’s important that you identify where you excel and where you might need some improvement to guide your competitive investigation. For example, if you think you could improve the quality of your product materials, spend more time analyzing how your competitors manage quality control.
To conduct the most effective competitive product analysis, you will have already identified the areas that require more of your attention. This will help the process be as efficient and strategic as possible.
Check out your competitor’s product descriptions, photos, and videos
After you’ve undergone some serious self-reflection, it’s time to see what the competition has to offer. Often in business, you’re so focused on your own work that it can be easy to overlook what the competition has been doing. Use this time to critically evaluate your competitor’s catalog and product display.
Your competitors’ product pages are a good place to start, but don’t be shy about going further. Extend your investigation to other areas of their website for more information. Check out social media and other sites to gather even more information. You want the fullest picture possible of what your competitor has out there.
Pay careful attention to how your competitor shows off their products—not just the product itself. How your competitor markets their products is just as important as the products themselves. Take a close look at their product photos and the captions they use to describe them. How do they entice customers? What can you learn from their marketing strategies to improve your own?
Monitor the competition’s innovation and development
Every business wants to be cutting edge and groundbreaking. That means that your competition has likely introduced innovative products, techniques, or technology into your industry. It’s important that you stay up to date on the recent innovation that your competition has been fostering.
Are certain features of the competition’s products especially innovative or unique? Have they developed new techniques to design or produce their products? Are they using novel technology as an innovative approach?
Innovation is critical to a successfully savvy business. Letting innovative approaches and developments go under your radar only harms your business. A competitive product analysis allows your business to examine what strategies are particularly effective for the competition and then improve your own products based on the results. Don’t let your industry leave you behind.
Evaluate customer opinion
You care what the customer thinks. If customers are dissatisfied or disappointed, something needs to be changed. If they love something, you should know about it. Online forums and customer review sites can give you excellent insight into how customers feel about the products your competitors offer. Be sure to include customer feedback in your product analysis.
Look for trends among the responses. Are customers consistently disappointed by the same feature? Are they really impressed by a specific aspect? What are they saying they’d like to see? Evaluating customer sentiment is one of the surest ways to figure out what works in your industry and what might lead you to fall behind.
Of course you should pay attention to feedback about your own products but seeing what’s working and what’s not for your competitor can give you insight you may never have considered.
The professionals at Archintel pride themselves on their high-quality research to keep your business ahead of the curve. A competitive product analysis is one of the key steps to get you on your way to commercial success. Use these tips to make it an effective one for your business. Then, get in touch with Archintel today to get started on your comprehensive intelligence strategy right away!