Use a Competitive Landscape Analysis to Create Your Team's Template to Success

Through a Competitive Landscape Analysis, an organization can compare itself to the competition on various dimensions. The organization can then identify areas for improvement. Broadly, the aim of the Competitive Landscape Analysis should be to demonstrate how the organization compares to others in the industry. In order to implement a Competitive Landscape Analysis, complete the following steps:

Step 1: Gather all publicly available information from the organization and its competition. These materials include but are not limited to marketing documents, brochures and fliers, and website information. This data will provide you with basic knowledge about the company. During this step you want to identify:

• The various products offered by the organization and its competitors.
• The media markets through which it advertises (e.g., social media, emails, advertisements, etc.). This knowledge might be used to establish different ways to engage with customers and develop the company brand.

Step 2: Identify third-party individuals who can provide additional insight. These individuals might be external consultants who are knowledgeable about the industry of interest, or employees in a niche area of the organization who can give their take on the competition from their specific perspective.

Step 3: Make sure that all of the information that you have accumulated is correct.

Step 4: Repeat. The business world is in a state of constant change. In order to remain competitive, the organization must continually reassess the other businesses in the industry.

Alternatively, Competitive Landscape Analyses can be conducted for specific purposes. Most commonly they are done for:

1. Market Size: Used when presenting to potential investors the proportion of the market that your organization occupies. This demonstrates the amount of promise the organization has and why it would be a worthy investment.
2. Customer Segment: Distinguish what type of client the organization attracts and why the organization is good for that group. This helps to clarify the value of the products the organization offers.
3. Customer Process and Systems: Useful for articulating the role the organization plays when it is one of many players that handle different client affairs. Doing a Competitive Landscape Analysis can be helpful for indicating the organization’s relevance to the client compared to its competitors.
4. Product Feature Capability: By doing a Competitive Landscape Analysis, the organization can advertise to clients the uniqueness of their products by highlighting the features of their products that are lacking in their competitors.

When a strategy team is looking to develop a plan of action for addressing competitive challenges, it is important to develop a method for reviewing competitor activity in a streamlined way. The new online Competitive Landscape Analysis template from Praxie is vital to developing a full understanding of your market. When conducting a Competitive Landscape Analysis, strategy teams should look at a variety of different inputs to build out their understanding of the competitive market. This means leveraging tools and templates that can work together and blend data seamlessly into a single competitive landscape view.  

The Competitive Landscape Analysis template provides strategists with a framework for aggregating key metrics related to your competitor’s performance and blends that information with data on best-in-class benchmarks across your industry. When all of the data sources are combined, this information becomes increasingly important to strategists as they develop long term competitive goals and objectives. In addition to typical strategic documents, such as spreadsheets, Competitive Landscape Analyses can be done using Venn Diagrams, Process Maps, 2×2 quadrant charts, and other visual tools. Get started with our Competitive Landscape Analysis template.  

How to use it: 

1. List your competitors in the first column of the table.  
2. Score their relative market position, ability to innovate, and overall business strategy.  
3. The analysis will automatically identify which competitors represent your greatest threat.  
4. Based on these competitors, conduct a more detailed competitive analysis to identify specific areas of threats and market gaps that represent opportunities. 

Unlike most traditional Competitive Landscape Analysis techniques, Praxie’s online Competitive Landscape Analysis collaboration tools allow any team or organization to instantly begin working with our web templates and input forms. Our digital platform goes far beyond other software tools by including progress dashboards, data integration from existing documents or other SaaS software, elegant intuitive designs, and full access on any desktop or mobile device.