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A Guide to Competitive Product Analysis

Competitive product analysis is a vital part of the product development process. It’s also frequently overlooked or lacking in depth. As a result, critical competitive intelligence is often missed resulting in poor product-market fit or delays in product development as the input that should have been gathered up front is discovered along the way resulting in costly redesigns or scope changes.

The following competitive product analysis guide contains some tips to help you conduct an effective competitive product analysis and avoid some of these common product development pitfalls.

What is competitive product analysis?

Competitive product analysis is the process of analyzing a competitor’s product to understand the benefits it provides customers as well as identify its key features and specifications, strengths and weaknesses, and position in the market – the value proposition.

Why do competitive product analysis?

Competitive product analysis is vital to product development for many reasons:

  1. Once you understand a competitor’s strengths and weaknesses, you can identify gaps and opportunities that can be used to guide your innovation process and define your product’s positioning, differentiation and value proposition.
  2. This will then help you develop effective messaging, marketing strategies and campaigns once you are ready to launch and promote your product.
  3. You can also use this vital competitive intelligence as a benchmark for existing products and identify opportunities for improvement.
  4. Competitive product analysis can also be used to abstract market trends so you can stay ahead and maintain your competitive edge.

Where to begin?

The first step is to determine your competitors.

Competitors can be divided into two categories: direct and indirect competitors. Direct competitors provide products that are similar to what you offer or wish to offer and operate in the same market as you. In other words, you would be essentially competing for the same customers. On the other hand, indirect competitors satisfy the same high-level market need but do so with an alternative product or service.

For example, desktops, laptops and tablets (indirect competitors) all satisfy the need for personal computing capabilities but vary in their ability to provide computing power, functionality and portability. Once a customer has assessed their needs, they are likely to only consider products from a single category and price range with specific features that match their needs (direct competitors).

When conducting a competitive product analysis, we recommend focusing on direct competitors but also keeping in mind indirect competitors as they can easily become direct competitors if they decide to enter into your market or if trends shift.

Now that you have identified your direct competitors, you are ready to begin gathering data.

Secondary Research

Analysis of existing sources, known as secondary data analysis, is the quickest and easiest way to get started. Here are a couple of ideas. Feel free to get creative in your search and look at sources that are specific to your industry or product category.

  • Competitor websites: Here you’ll often find a wealth of information from product descriptions, specifications, marketing documentation and technical manuals.
  • Reviews: These can sometimes be found directly on the competitor’s website, especially if customers can purchase direct, otherwise, Amazon and other retail sites can be good options. Review sites (ex. Consumer Reports, CNET for tech products) can also be a gold mine of information.
  • Social media: Browsing through a company’s social media profiles, comments (especially from irate customers) and mentions can also yield insights about a product’s features, benefits, strengths, weaknesses, positioning, partnerships and strategy.
  • Forums: Some product categories (ex. pro audio equipment) have very active forums where people post opinions on products or seek guidance and alternative product suggestions from other members.
  • Video & Podcasts: Informative product videos, unboxing reviews, podcast advertisements and spots can also shed light on a product’s unique selling proposition (USP) and areas for improvement.

As you go through these sources, pay attention to the vocabulary and imagery to observe which elements are emphasized. Compare the features of the products to identify the “need to have” versus the “nice to have” features. Keep in mind the customer’s needs and ask yourself what is missing and should be there but isn’t or what can be done better or differently. This will help you identify gaps and areas of improvement. Finally, tracking the evolution of the product can also reveal trends.

A word of caution when evaluating the quality and integrity of sources. Be mindful of affiliates and sponsored content as theses sources could be heavily biased. A good practice is to triangulate the data, which means to validate it using multiple sources (and multiple methods). For example, if a review discusses a particular weakness in the design, is it mentioned elsewhere?

Primary Research

Once you have collected secondary data, you can enrich it with primary research which is original data that collected firsthand. You can use this as an opportunity to clarify points that came up in the secondary research or explore areas that were not covered by secondary data. Here are some methods you can employ.

  • Product testing: If you are able to get the competitor’s product, you can test it and get a feel for it yourself.
  • In-depth interviews: Speaking directly to users of the competitor’s product or potential customers can provide rich feedback about the competing product’s strengths and weaknesses as well as insights into what they love and hate about the product and their decision-making process.
  • Online forums: In addition to checking other people’s posts on forums, you can also engage with customers and ask for feedback.

Now that you’ve gathered all these data points, the challenge is in organizing and sorting through everything to uncover valuable and actionable insights.

Next Steps

Are you interested in learning more about competitive product analysis?

Schedule a call with us to see how the Blueboxfish team can support your product development and innovation objectives.

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