Chapter 6. Competitive Research
Who is the competition?
- “No one! No one is doing anything that even comes close to what we are doing!”
- “The top five companies by market share in our vertical.”
- “The first page of search results for ‘[relevant term]’ on Google. All of them.”
The correct answer is b plus c plus Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, Wikipedia, K-pop YouTube channels, everyone who ever had an idea for a startup, the nosey neighbor who offers unsolicited advice, all the people at the dog park, inertia, insecurity, fear, corporate bureaucracy, sunk infrastructure costs, memory lapses, duct tape, bubble gum, ADD, marijuana, the sofa, some hacker in Serbia you’ve never heard of, what all the kids are doing these days, one weird fruit this gut doctor begs Americans not to eat, and anything else that anyone does with their time or money.
The hardest competitor to beat is the one your potential customers are using right now. If they have to stop using that one to start using yours, they may incur a switching cost. People are lazy, forgetful creatures of habit. Your target customers have to love you more than they hate change.
This chapter follows the one on user and customer research for a reason. You need to know not only who your competitors are from the perspective of the business (that’s generally obvious), but also who competes for attention in the minds of your target users. Attention is the rarest resource and the one you need to survive. Unless your goal is to sell one very expensive item to a small number of people, you need to convert attention into habit.
This is not the place for wishful thinking. It’s a jungle out there, a hostile and constantly changing ecosystem, and you want the thing you’re building to have the best chance to adapt and survive—like the creature from Alien, but with a more pleasant user interface. You need to know the landscape and the competition.
So now that we’ve cast the doors wide open, how do we narrow down the field?
By taking a hard look at the role you want to play in your target customer’s life and the advantages and disadvantages that affect your ability to do so.
Competitive research begins with a broad perspective on the competition. You may be looking for things to steal, like approaches and customers. You need to see how other people are solving similar problems, and identify opportunities to offer something uniquely valuable. You need to do this frequently and quickly; get in the habit of constantly asking not only “What matters to our customers?” (the user question) but also “How are we better at serving that need than any competitor?” (the product question) and “How can we show our target customers that our product is the superior choice?” (the marketing question).
When you look at what your competitors are doing, you only see what is visible on the outside, unless you have a mole. That’s what your users see as well, so user research won’t help you here. It will take some deeper digging, critical thinking, and extrapolation to determine (or make a good guess at) why your competitor is doing things a certain way.
SWOT Analysis
Albert S. Humphrey was a management consultant who devised something called SWOT analysis (http://bkaprt.com/jer2/06-01/, PDF): strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. You arrange them in a handy 2 × 2 grid and use them to guide your strategy (Fig 6). Your work with your own organization (or the research you’ve done into your client’s organization) should have provided you with a good sense of your (or their) internal strengths and weaknesses.
Once you’ve enumerated these characteristics, you can identify the aspects of the user experience that serve to amplify strengths and exploit opportunities as well as those that mitigate weaknesses and counteract threats.
Your strengths and opportunities add up to your competitive advantage. Knowledge is a competitive advantage. If you do competitive research and your competitor doesn’t, you have an advantage. Specifically, your research should focus on competitive opportunities and threats.
Competitive Audit
Once you have identified a set of competitors and a set of brand attributes, conduct an audit to see how you stack up. In addition to those organizations you think of as competitors, conduct a web search to see who else comes up. Add in any product or service that was mentioned repeatedly in user interviews and anyone you admire as a leader solving a similar type of problem.
Study this list and identify which aspects of your competitors’ work are most relevant and accessible. This might include things like marketing websites, mobile applications, information kiosks on site at the actual location, Facebook groups, or third-party storefronts.
For each competitor and each site, product, service, or touchpoint, answer the following:
- How do they explicitly position themselves? What do they say they offer?
- Who do they appear to be targeting? How does this overlap or differ from your target audience or users?
- What are the key differentiators? The factors that make them uniquely valuable to their target market, if any?
- To what extent do they embody each of your positive/negative attributes?
- How do the user needs or wants they’re serving overlap or differ from those that you’re serving or desire to serve?
- What are they doing particularly well or badly?
- Based on this assessment, where do you see emerging or established conventions in how they do things, opportunities to offer something clearly superior, or good practices you’ll need to adopt or take into consideration to compete with them?
Brand Audit
In addition to looking at how your competitors position and differentiate themselves, take a good, hard look at your own brand. Is it doing the work it needs to and setting the right expectations for the overall experience? Do you need to do some work on it?
Your brand is simply your reputation and those things that signify your identity and reputation to your current and potential customers. That reputation offers a promise of all the good things you do for your customers, most of which exist only in the customer’s mind. The stronger the brand, the more awesome associations pop up in more people’s minds. Coca-Cola is a phenomenal brand, producing positive emotional associations across the globe on a product that is fundamentally caffeinated sugar water. Tremendous continuous effort goes into brand marketing. You probably don’t need that.
For many interactive products and services, there is no “brand” apart from the service itself. The brand experience is the user experience. The visual design of the interface is the brand identity. The brand personality is the voice of the interface language.
Here are the questions you need to ask about your brand:
- Attributes: Which characteristics do you want people inside and outside the company to associate with the brand or product? Which do you want to avoid?
- Value proposition: What does your product or service offer that others do not? How does your brand communicate this?
- Customer perspective: When you conduct ethnographic interviews with existing or potential customers, what associations do they have with your brand?
The significance of the different aspects of your brand will vary tremendously with your marketplace. If you’re a local business providing an essential service with no competition—for example, the only dry cleaner in town—you just need a name so your potential customers know you exist. Given a wider audience, stronger competition, or a “premium” product or service (which just means it’s less necessary to daily life), branding becomes more important. This is why branding is critical for Pepsi and Tiffany.
Keep all of this in mind as you do a competitive brand analysis. Make sure you’re comparing apples to apples, not Apple to Starbright Cleaners.
Name
The name is the single most important aspect of a brand. What makes a good name varies from market to market like everything else. At a minimum, though, a name needs to be unique, unambiguous, and easy to spell and say. Now that .com domain names are far less important than they used to be, there’s less pressure to find that short name.
Logo
An internet mogul with a penchant for dramatic pronouncements once swept into our office and declared, “The logomark is dead. The only thing that matters now is the URL. That’s how people find you.”
He was wrong, of course. But the right answer isn’t that a logo is incredibly important to every single internet-based business. The right answer is, “It depends.” This is why a logo can cost between $99 and $5 million.
Your logo is simply the illustrative manifestation of your brand, which can take several forms: wordmark, bug, app icon, favicon, etc. Which logo you choose and how much you spend on it depends on the contexts in which people are going to have to identify your stuff and distinguish it from your competitors.
The logos of established athletic equipment brands are incredibly valuable because of their power to imbue otherwise undifferentiated shoes and shorts with the godlike virtues of associated sports stars and generate billions. And yet, when Nike was new, a student designed the Swoosh for a pittance (and a chunk of stock).
The logo of a new web app is less important. Customers won’t typically need to use the logo standing by itself to distinguish one service from another. The name and functionality matter more until brand marketing becomes necessary.
Native mobile apps represent a new level of challenge, since the app icons are so constrained in size and dimension and do have to work very hard in that small, uniform space to help a user distinguish one app from another. You don’t want to look at your phone’s home screen and get confused about which icon opens which app.
To conduct an effective logo assessment, list all of the contexts in which the target users are likely to encounter it, and review your competitors’ logos in the same contexts. Also note whether the logo will ever appear on its own or will always be connected to a larger brand or product experience. This will indicate the relative importance of the logo as an expression of your overall brand.
Putting it all together
Once you’ve identified the core attributes of your brand (both positive and negative), assess the product name and brand identity for how well they reflect and communicate that personality.
Usability-Testing the Competition
Don’t just test your own product—test your competitor’s! You can use task-based usability testing (described in Chapter 7) to evaluate a competitor’s website or application. This allows you to understand their strengths and weaknesses directly from the user’s point of view, identify opportunities to develop your advantages, and gain insight into how target users conceptualize core tasks and key features.
A Niche in Time
The competitive landscape and how what you’re designing fits into it may be the fastest-moving target of all research topics. New options appear—and product categories collapse—every day. Just taking a user-eye view at how your company, product, and message measure up will give you some competitive advantage. The accurate, user-centered perspective of your comparative strengths and weaknesses will help you focus your message and hone your image.