Leadership is willing to engage in debates about the relative positioning and market share of competitors.
Over the years, I have developed several tools to make the process of analyzing competing messaging more accessible, empirical (less subjectivist), more graphical, and easy to understand. It all begins with a simple approach to business strategy that gives us the rational foundation we need to evaluate marketing messages.
In the past decade, hundreds of books have been written on the topic of competitive messaging. Each one has a different perspective. I prefer the approach described by Michael Treacy & Fred Wiersema, The Discipline of Market Leaders, which adapts Harvard expert Michael Porter’s Five Forces Model to market positioning.
Treacy and Wiersema state that companies can adopt three “disciplines” or approaches to business strategy.
- Product/technology Leadership, including development of cutting-edge innovation and product performance, e.g., Apple
- Operational Excellence, or fine-tuning operations to achieve the highest level of capabilities, either in product purity (e.g., a chemical company) or in price (e.g., Walmart).
- Customer intimacy is the ability to customize products and services around the individual needs of customers (e.g., logistics with UPS).
Porter advises companies to choose only one position to take in order to determine their market positioning. Of course, companies cannot let the quality of their service in other areas deteriorate. They must ensure that they devote the majority of their resources towards advancing their leadership in the market discipline they have chosen. Porter believes that this is the essence of competitive positioning.
How to position your competitors in four steps
The pyramid below illustrates, if you like, the “battlefield” on which all the competitors are arranged. The map lays out the competition landscape for the three disciplines.
Assemble your competitor list.
First, you need to create a list of your competitors. Choose the obvious competitors, such as the leaders in the markets for sales, reputations, product quality, and customer service. But also consider the “not-in kind” competitors who may be entering the market soon or could.
Market entry has been disrupted by low-cost and low-quality entrants in the last few decades. You don’t wish to be like Kodak, which dismissed digital photography as too low-end.
I would only list four or five.
Get their marketing materials.
It is usually difficult to obtain marketing materials from each competitor. You should get marketing materials, such as ads, emails, or sales collateral, because they often concentrate on positioning.
You can capture estimates of advertising spending and creative ads if you have access to competitive ad-research companies such as AdSpyder and SpyFu. This is a useful statistic for clients who are reluctant to spend what they should. Note: Access to most ad-research companies requires a subscription.
In the event that all other resources fail, social media and a competitor’s website are sufficient for analyzing marketing messaging. When I do high-level research on branding, I look at:
- Home
- Visit our About Us page
- If the company has “values” sheets, you can find them on their website.
- Some product or industry pages
Analysis of competitors’ content
You can run the key pages or sites of competitors through one of the many word cloud generators, such as WordClouds.com. This tool is fun to use, and it can reveal some interesting trends.
I prefer to copy all the text on the page into a Word Document and then do a search to see how many times’ x’ appears in the copy.
Crunch the data
Writers, being the clever devils that they are, often use synonyms in order to avoid the repetition of certain words or phrases. A typical example of product-technology leadership might be “innovation,” and writers might use terms such as “cutting-edge,” “advanced,” “technology-leading,” and others to convey similar ideas or feelings. The value disciplines are divided into sub-themes and categories.
This problem was made clear on an occasion when 12 people were present at a meeting, and ten different “positions” or ideas were proposed to the client. Our positioning landscape looked like this after a full-day strategy session:
To solve the problem, I created a graphic that gives a broader view of the value disciplines by grouping words and phrases that are similar or closely aligned.
This allowed us to realize that the twelve positioning statements given to us during the strategy meeting were not random. In fact, they had staked out an innovative product/technology positioning.
This allowed us to examine a competitor’s marketing materials and website to see how they position themselves. The semantic pyramid is adjusted for different industries and technologies to match the popular terminology in each segment. The principle is the same.
It is then a matter of counting the number of words or phrases that are associated with each value discipline in each competitor’s material. I create a table, which may or may not include the client.
I will also select a key content piece and highlight the words or phrases that best represent the company’s position:
By pointing out similar phrases on important pages on a competitor’s website, you can see how they are positioning themselves. You’ll get little feedback when you use this method.
We can now place competitors on our landscape (or “map”) that we created earlier.
The competitive landscape can help company leaders see their position more clearly and focus on making sure it is consistent in all of their published material.
In the example, I would call out Competitor A, which is located in the middle. On several occasions, a company stated that it would be best to address all three positions equally.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. Michael Porter, Harvard’s strategy expert, says that competitor B is in a messy middle position without any positioning. This means that the customers of the company won’t be able to tell what is important to them, and their employees will probably not either.
Will you ever find that a competitor’s marketing says one thing, but their salespeople or the market reality proves something else? It happens. This is happening less frequently as companies become more consistent with their positioning. It is not a good strategy to confuse your audience.