Competitive Product: Definition + How To Analyze One

Competition among products is a normal part of running a business. It might provide unexpected advantages, such as setting your business apart from competitors and keeping you inspired to develop. If your product is competitive, it satisfies the demands and expectations of customers. Consider Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle Fire. Both provide customers with a tablet experience and meet comparable requirements at different price ranges.

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What are Competitive Products Analysis?

Finding the advantages, disadvantages, and current market position of your competitors’ products is known as competitive product analysis. It helps you create effective methods to outperform your competitors and allows you to figure out the existing demand for your goods.

Customer behavior is separated into three categories by the most basic value proposition canvas for competition analysis: needs, wants, and fears. Customers purchase products out of necessity, fear of losing them, or the luxury of owning them. Benefits, features, and experience are the three categories into which it divides the product. After considering the characteristics, understanding the advantages, and assessing past or present interactions with the company offering the product, customers prefer to buy products.

How to conduct a competitive product analysis

Competitive analysis is identifying your competitors, both direct and indirect, and researching to determine their advantages and disadvantages in comparison to your own. In this article, we’ll go over how to do competitive analysis. Conduct your competitive product analysis by following these four steps.

Identify and analyse your competitors

Spend some time reconsidering competitors, paying special attention to competitive products, even if you have already done so as part of your marketing strategy or company plan. Gather as much publicly accessible information as you can about other companies from websites, sales and product pages, annual reports, email subscriptions, social media, and customer reviews. For each competitive product, answer the following questions:

What characteristics make them unique?
How often do the features get updated?
What results or advantages can one expect from using this product?
Which marketing messaging does the other company use to draw in the target audience?
What visual presentation does the product have in pictures, videos, or mockups?
What is the price?
What are the sales numbers of the competitors?
What kinds of marketing strategies, such as coupons, discounts, free trials, and value improvements, do other businesses use?

Experience competitive products for yourself

Following the collection of publicly available product information, you should buy each product or enroll in a free trial to test it out as a customer would. Answer the questions below to compare your experience to the event’s marketing objective.

How was the actual experience of buying the product for you? Do you order it online, find it in a real store, or get it in the mail or digitally? Is it necessary to register for a live experience or create an online customer account?
What features of the product do you like and dislike?
Do you get the results or advantages that were promised? In what way and to what level?
How does it feel to contact customer care by phone, live, or online to report a problem or question about features?
Does the product’s price make sense based on your experience with it?

Identify weaknesses in competitive products.

Create a list of the weaknesses of the competing product based on the information you obtained in steps one and two. By completing this stage, you may determine how to create things that people want to buy and outsell other companies.

What features do people want to see in a product, based on reviews and testimonials?
What features do you wish the product had that you could incorporate into your own creation based on your experience with it?
Which features are unnecessary or perhaps distracting?
If these elements were eliminated, would the final product be better?
What aspects of locating and buying the product do you find difficult, complicated, or unclear?

Identify your differentiators.

Consider how you will differentiate your product and get a competitive advantage using the knowledge gained from phases one through three. You can draw in customers in your target market, turn them into paying clients, and win their loyalty by completing this phase.

How can you create features for your products that satisfy consumer needs and wants, close gaps in the market, and differentiate yourself from the competition?
What particular improvements are you able to make?
Which unnecessary components are you able to remove?
How will these features affect the user experience?
What results and advantages may your product provide?
Considering the value proposition of your product and the cost of manufacturing, how would you price it about the prices of your competitors?
How will you test the market for your product’s unique features to see how potential customers feel about them?
What kind of marketing messaging would you use to highlight the product’s benefits over competitors once it is available?

How Do You Write Competitive Analysis?

It’s time to put all of the information in one place now that you know what to include in a competitor analysis report. The most effective approach to accomplish this is to collect all of the information about other companies into an Excel file. It should be the first page you check whenever you require information about a product offered by a competitor. This is a representation of a competitive analysis. The list includes:

Company name
Product name
UX issues
Product listing issues
Percentage of positive and negative reviews
Product design issues
Key features
Missing features
Price
Perks
Share of voice
Sentiment Analysis
Pros of the product
Cons of the product
SEO details
Social media metrics
Content marketing
Sales and customer support

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Competitive Product FAQs

Q1- How to analyse a competitive product?

Ans- Finding your main competitors, obtaining information about their features, costs, promotions, and customer reviews, and analyzing their advantages and disadvantages with your product are the main steps in doing an accurate analysis of a competing product. Make use of this information to find places that could use improvement and differentiation.

Q2- What is a SWOT analysis for competitors?

Ans- The basic idea behind a competitor SWOT analysis is to assess the competitor's business in order to have a better understanding of theirs as well as yours.

Q3- What is a perfectly competitive product?

Ans- Perfect competition comes when all businesses sell the same goods, market share has no bearing on prices, businesses are free to enter or leave, customers have complete or perfect information, and companies are unable to set prices.

Q4- What is a competitive benchmark?

Ans- Analyzing your brand's performance in comparison to others in your industry is the goal of competitive benchmarking. You can compare them favorably or badly by analyzing their business strategy, their processes, or the goods and services they provide.

Q5- What is swot in business?

Ans- SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats in the context of business. A strategic planning technique called a SWOT analysis is used to assess a company's internal and external environments to find elements that may affect its performance and help in decision-making.