Introduction: Navigating the Competitive Landscape

No company operates in a vacuum. Every company is part of a value chain influenced by market forces that shape the competitive landscape. According to Porter’s Five Forces framework, these forces include direct threats from competitors, threats of new entrants or substitute products, and the bargaining power of suppliers and buyers.

Among all these forces, the impact of competitors’ activities is most significant compared to others.

Therefore, a company must closely monitor its competitors’ activities to understand their strategies, strengths, weaknesses, priorities, resource allocations, and other strategic indicators. This understanding will empower a company to strategically position itself within the competitive landscape and develop a sustainable competitive advantage.

In this article, we will discuss the importance of competitive positioning and how companies benefit from it. Let’s start by first defining competitive positioning.

What is Competitive Positioning?

Basically, competitive positioning is how a company differentiates it’s products or services from its competitors’ in the minds of the customers. It’s about deliberately highlighting unique differentiations to help customers understand why they should choose you over competitors.

According to April Dunford, “Positioning defines how your product is a leader at delivering something that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about.”

In the above definition, “delivering something” is your value proposition, and “well-defined set of customers” is your target market segment. 

Competitive positioning is all about identifying your target customers’ unmet needs and mapping them to your company’s core strengths. If you are unable to identify such needs, you should consider reviewing your target customers. 

Examples of competitive positioning include choosing to differentiate through price, product or service quality, superior customer service, innovation, or customization — whatever is important for your target customers and not offered by competitors. 

Importance of Competitive Positioning

One of the greatest benefits of competitive positioning is this process infuses your organization with purpose and direction, guiding not only your marketing strategy but your entire business strategy. 

  • This clarity helps keep your team members focused and strategically aligned with the organization’s goals. 
  • It improves internal alignment, coordination, and communication, leading to more efficient and effective teamwork.
  • In an over-communicated society, having a clear competitive positioning increases the chances that your messages get heard and recognized. 

Competitive positioning plays a central role in attracting and retaining customers. By embracing strengths-based positioning, you can create a “barrier to entry” for competitors. This is achieved by strengthening those aspects, systems, and processes that are the sources of your competitive differentiation.

How to Develop Effective Competitive Positioning

To develop effective competitive positioning, you must start by understanding your target customers’ unmet needs. Customers always have these needs because they are constantly trying to improve – seeking better or more cost-effective solutions. 

Why constantly? Because your customers’ competitors are also continuously trying to improve. That’s the nature of capitalism. And if your customers don’t improve continuously, they will lose to their competitors.

These unmet needs from the customers’ perspective must be considered while defining your value proposition for competitive positioning. By aligning these needs with your organization’s core strengths, you can address the gaps to compete better with your competitors. 

This step is crucial before developing your competitive positioning as the leader in the minds of your customers.

Irrespective of your target segment, one thing is certain in the B2B domain: all customers research and evaluate different products before making a purchase decision. During this process, they develop a perception of your products and services available to address their unmet needs compared to your competitors’ products. 

Their experiences with your products influence their expectations and develop a frame of reference. Your target customers’ frame of reference defines your competitive landscape.

This frame of reference is shaped by the information available on your competitors, such as press announcements, business news coverage, customer reviews, and marketing content, such as white papers, blogs, webinars, social posts, etc. Therefore, understanding your competitors’ positioning is essential before defining your differentiated positioning in the competitive landscape.

By closely monitoring your competitors, you gain insights into the information they share and how they position themselves in the minds of customers.

Role of Competitive Intelligence in Developing Your Positioning

Competitive intelligence is the ongoing process of gathering and analyzing information on competitors. Why is it an ongoing process? 

Because, unlike the vision and mission of a company, competitive positioning is not static. It is a dynamic process and evolves with the organization’s next milestones. Let’s understand with the example of IBM. 

IBM started as a hardware company. With the shift in the market and the growth in software and services, IBM transitioned its positioning from a machine-centric company to a solutions provider to meet the customer’s changing needs. 

Over time their positioning has evolved and today they position themselves as a leader in cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and other cutting-edge technologies. Their focus has moved beyond offering solutions to empowering businesses through digital transformation. 

To stay relevant to the changing landscape and customers’ evolving needs, IBM continued to study its market and competitors. Incorporating these insights into its business strategies helped it evolve with the changes and stay relevant in the dynamic market landscape. 

Companies need comprehensive competitive intelligence methodologies to capture relevant information and structure information about competitors. This information helps to identify gaps in the market, competitors’ movements, and what customers perceive of their brand. It also helps to create a positioning roadmap to map strengths and align them with the unmet needs of the customer, capturing the attention of prospective customers by highlighting key differentiators.

Ongoing competitive intelligence practice ensures that your positioning is responsive to market dynamics, helping your organization stand out in a crowded marketplace.

Select the Right Tool for Competitive Intelligence

In today’s world of information overload, automation is the way to conduct comprehensive research on what your competitor is doing without missing critical updates. The right competitive intelligence tool will provide: 

  • Access to a worldwide net of content sources that are reliable, accurate, and relevant
  • Convenience to find relevant insights easily without reading long articles 
  • Seamless process to communicate insights across different business functions 

Contify M&CI platform is the automation engine you can trust to track competitors’ movements and anticipate their next strategic direction. 

 

How will the Contify Platform be your single source of truth? 

Comprehensive Information Sourcing of Competitors: The Contify platform provides access to 1Mn+ vetted content sources including company websites, press releases, regulatory portals, and industry publications. A continuous mapping of what competitor’s are doing and saying can help to understand their brand positioning and evaluate your current positioning, identify and strengthen your value propositions and understand the need gap in the market.  

Smart Filters to Reduce Noise: Its custom taxonomies help to access curated information in a structured and noise-free manner. You can filter your competitor’s information based on topics like new offerings, emerging tech, operational challenges, mergers and acquisitions, partnerships, etc.  

Automated Answers to Key Intelligence Questions: The Contify platform also features an Insight module, which further simplifies information consumption. Powered by a unique combination of large language models (LLMs) and Knowledge Graphs, the Insights module helps you find answers to specific queries with Key Intelligence Questions (KIQs). 

You can ask KIQs like “How [competitor] is positioning itself?” and the module will give relevant information based on the stored data on your competitors. This significantly reduces the time to sift through data to find insights like this. 

Here is an example of how Contify’s marketing team uses the Insights module to efficiently analyze the positioning of our competitors and craft differentiating positioning for our products.

The above image includes how two of our News API competitors position themselves. Webz.io positions itself as a provider of AI-powered news APIs that enhance data insights and risk management, and key messaging focuses on extensive data coverage, powerful filtering capabilities, and operational efficiency.

Aylien, on the other hand, positions itself as an AI-powered news intelligence and risk management solution, and key messaging focuses on user experience, advanced search capabilities, and free trial availability. 

While planning our product positioning, content, and campaigns we review the positioning of these existing players, to stay ahead and stand out in the market. Having an accurate understanding of the positioning of our competitors enables us to get a complete understanding of the market, and the need gap which we can communicate.

Some more capabilities of Contify that help it become your single source of truth includes:

Automated visualization of strategic information: The platform has auto-updating widgets that automate the creation of strategic graphs and charts to benchmark competitors or understand their product timelines. With an intuitive dashboard, you can get a unified view of the information. 

Seamless information dissemination across teams: It also ensures smooth information delivery across various business functions with automated newsletters and alerts. Integrations with other communication platforms, such as Slack, MS Teams, and CRMs, are also available. This helps you keep your teams updated with the latest information on competitors so they can make informed decisions. 

Take a free trial of Contify’s Market and Competitive Intelligence Platform.

Competitive Intelligence-based Positioning: The Key to Staying Ahead

Today’s competitive landscape is evolving continuously and strategies built on incomplete data are irrelevant. Past strategies that may have worked before will not work with the changing dynamics. Your strategies should be aligned with the ever-evolving market and competitive landscape.

Competitive Intelligence helps businesses stay informed about their competitors and gives a clear understanding of their positioning. Using specific insights into your competitor’s movement helps you to distinctly position your brand in the minds and hearts of your potential customers. 

By continuously monitoring your competitors, you will remain updated with their movements and make strategic changes in your marketing messaging. It will help you stand out and address the value gaps in the minds of your potential customers. 

Keep a finger on the pulse of your customer’s frame of reference and align your offerings with their expectations, enhance your value proposition, and improve your competitive positioning. This insights-driven approach will help you win new customers and retain existing ones.

FAQs

1. How often should I update my competitive monitoring strategy?

Competitive monitoring should be performed quarterly. However, to get desired results companies should conduct a monthly monitoring. 

2. What are some benefits of competitive monitoring?

A robust competitive monitoring process can help businesses stay ahead of their competitors by keeping track of their wins and losses and analyzing their positioning, messaging, and strategies. It also helps to identify the untapped market and leverage a competitive edge. By identifying the potential gaps, businesses can capture the opportunities. A detailed analysis of the competitive market also helps to benchmark the product and identify gaps to make strategic decisions. 

3. How can businesses avoid information overload in competitive monitoring?

Information overload is one of the biggest challenges in competitive monitoring. To overcome this, companies can prioritize their sources of information based on defined objectives. However, the challenge in manual content sourcing is that important updates often get missed out while filtering out. In this case, businesses need a comprehensive competitive monitoring tool that can help to track a large volume of credible sources that can be smartly filtered based on requirements and can be distributed seamlessly across business functions within existing workflows.