With innovation pervading today’s hypercompetitive markets, the need to rethink or build a robust competitive positioning strategy could hardly be more urgent. Hence, leading players are now analyzing their current position with an intent to match or exceed that of their peers.
Businesses that have redefined their strategy must stay prepared to tackle future challenges to avoid repeating the past. On the contrary, those who haven’t done much in this regard must analyze their vulnerability and understand what it takes to build a robust competitive positioning strategy.
Creating a competitive positioning strategy can help businesses tackle many business issues. Since this process is complex, leadership teams must adopt new methodologies, streamline processes, and systematically analyze their competitive positions. A competitive positioning strategy helps businesses differentiate their offerings and build value over time by analyzing the competitive landscape and focusing its resources to deliver on that strategy. The essence of a competitive positioning strategy revolves around coping with intense competitive pressures from across industry segments.
Knowledge of these underlying sources of competitive pressures often provides the groundwork for a robust competitive positioning strategy. However, coming to grips with either understanding competitive pressures or creating value isn’t easy. Analyzing these factors requires in-depth research and competitive intelligence since it isn’t easy for any business to fully understand its market position and capitalize on new opportunities without reliable market data and in-depth insights.
Looking to create a robust positioning strategy but unsure where to begin? We’ve got you covered, Contact our experts to gain detailed insights into our solution portfolio or find answers to the industry-specific queries you may have.
Five Keys to Developing a Robust Competitive Positioning Strategy
Our competitive intelligence experts shed light on five focus areas to help small and medium-sized businesses conduct in-depth market research as they shape their competitive positioning strategy.
Evaluate and understand market dynamics by conducting in-depth quantitative market research
The key is to focus on market evaluation in the initial stages of market research. This can help businesses better understand the market in terms of its size and new opportunities. Global market insights, industry reports, external data, and competitive insights will help you analyze the growth trajectory in niche markets and identify the total potential sales in each segment.
The next step in understanding your market is determining whether your market is growing, stable, or shrinking and what external forces shape your market. An in-depth analysis of the market lifecycle stage will further enhance the process and help devise the best competitive positioning strategy.
Deep dive into market psychographics and understand your customers and target market segments
While developing a competitive positioning strategy, it’s equally important to understand your prospects’ pain points, behavior, and decision-making processes apart from the market dynamics. Understanding each of these factors will aid the development of a robust strategy and help fulfill customer needs.
This understanding will also help you define personas and deep dive into distinct market segments, enabling you to target each segment more effectively. We offer customized solutions for your every business requirement- Request a free proposal to get started.
Analyze the competitive landscape and identify areas with high market potential
Competitive analysis that focuses on analyzing competitive dynamics will help businesses gauge their strengths and weaknesses and determine the challenges they must overcome to gain an edge in the market. Performing an in-depth analysis will also help you determine your direct, indirect, and potential competitors. These insights, along with the insights obtained from detailed quantitative and qualitative market research, will act as a starting point for an in-depth SWOT analysis, highlighting strengths, weaknesses, and new market opportunities.
A detailed competitive analysis might also shed light on your competitor’s strategies and offer a holistic view of your current market position and a projection of your future position.
For over 17 years, we have helped leading players across segments gain a competitive edge through our competitive intelligence solutions. Request a free brochure to gain detailed insights into our recent engagements.
Identify a key differentiator and the method to deliver value to your market
Value proposition plays a crucial role in the success of your competitive positioning strategy. Hence determining how you will deliver value to your market will help accelerate success.
The impact of the value being delivered will reverberate throughout, affecting not just your competitive positioning strategy but also pricing and messaging strategies. This means aligning each of these factors and identifying how your competitors deliver value will help improve the outcome of your competitive positioning strategy.
Define a unique, robust competitive positioning strategy
Developing a competitive positioning strategy is a complex process. It involves performing detailed analysis and evaluating factors that impact business growth. But all of this ultimately boils down to either one goal you wish to achieve or a unique selling point you want to be remembered for among the masses. To hone in on that, one must streamline the elements that influence the competitive positioning strategy, identify the mindshare you’d like to own, and determine your strategy to get there.
The key to rapid business growth, sometimes even survival, is to stake out a position that is less vulnerable to attack from top players and competitors, both established and new. Establishing a competitive position may require solidifying customer relationships, identifying market differentiators, and achieving technological leadership. Competitive positioning is all about winning mindshare in the marketplace by defining how you’ll differentiate your offerings.
At the core, your competitive positioning strategy must define what you want to be known for and how you plan to achieve it in the long run. Hence, while creating your competitive positioning strategy, it’s a good idea to evaluate different aspects of your market, including market size, potential, demographics, and psychographics, to understand how you stack up against the competition. We hope the steps outlined in this article will help you in this process. If you’re looking for detailed insights on any of these factors – Request more information now!
