Establish Competitive Advantage
One highly effective way to drive growth is to establish a strong competitive advantage and effectively communicate it to your target customers. But it must be true from the customers’ point of view. There is often a dangerous disparity between what customers want and what companies think they want. We know how to eliminate that gap, and capture a comprehensive set of your target customers’ functional, emotional, and social needs in a format that is ideal for establishing competitive advantage and driving growth.
We will reveal what customers want and how well-satisfied they are with your offerings and your competitors’ offerings. We will help you identify important unsatisfied needs in your market that you can address to build competitive advantage. Jack Welch famously said “If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete!” We say, “If you don’t have a competitive advantage, create one!”
Most companies conduct competitive analysis by comparing their product and service features with their competitors’. The problem with this approach is twofold:
- The evaluation is often executed by employees with little or no validation from customers.
- Customers don’t care about “features.” People buy products and services to get tasks done, not to acquire features. A product or service feature is only as valuable to customers as it is useful in helping them get an important a task done. Generally speaking, the offering that helps people get their task done best is the offering they will purchase.
A much better way to determine your competitive strengths and weaknesses – and establish a competitive advantage that makes the competition irrelevant – is to determine how well you are helping target customers’ get their key tasks done, and how effectively you are addressing the criteria they use to measure the value of your offering.
We can show you exactly how well you and your competitors are performing at helping target customers accomplish their tasks according to the criteria they use to measure success. The criteria they use to measure success is the same criteria they use to measure the value of your offering. This information is ideal for generating breakthrough ideas, guiding the development of new and improved offerings, and establishing competitive advantage.
We help clients establish competitive advantage through speaking, workshops, and consulting projects of all sizes, based on your unique situation. Contact us to learn more.