How To Analyze Your Competition's Marketing

In an interesting and helpful follow-up to Monday's post about finding your USP, Marketing Sherpa interviewed the principal of Messages That Matter, Lawson Abinanti and asked him about how to analyze your competition's marketing.

In a nutshell, the first four common-sense tips he outlined were:

1. Isolate direct competitors. “It would be the hated enemies, the companies that you go head to head with in the battles out on the sales front,” Abinanti says.
2. Collect competitor's marketing materials. He said to check their print advertising first because that represents their most current marketing position and the largest expenditure of their marketing budget.
3. Assemble your analysis team. You want to schedule a group brainstorming session with as many folks as possible so that you can really analyze and understand your competition's pitch.
4. Distill the marketing into competitive positions. Figure out exactly what it is your competition is saying, and to whom. What's their positioning statement?

But the real curve ball, for me at least, came in his fifth step, and this is what I think you'll find most handy.

5. Map the competitive positions you discover.

From Marketing Sherpa's interview:

After identifying competitors’ marketing positions, you need to create a map of the competitive landscape to help you visualize where competitors have staked out territory -- and where openings might exist that you can exploit.

Start by logging the results in a table, placing the names of the companies in column headings and then assigning the different marketing positions to rows. Type an “X” underneath each company next to the primary message (or messages) of their ad statement.

Next, turn that table into a graphic. Abinanti has a team member build an Excel application that turns tables into star-shaped charts that plot competitors’ names along or between different legs representing each marketing position statement (see creative samples below). You can also build a chart manually in PowerPoint.

If you find that each competitor is using a unique marketing concept and, therefore, no clear groupings are emerging, consider combining similar ideas into a single concept to see if a pattern exists. For example, in Abinanti’s analysis of the enterprise CPM market he combined concepts such as predictable performance and better business performance to group companies.

A good competitive map will show you where competitors are clustered and which marketing concepts are most commonly employed. From there, it’s back to brainstorming (preferably with the same team who performed the competitive analysis) to determine your own company’s marketing position that will stand out from the crowd.