Identifying Successful Products Based on a More Effective Market and Competition Analysis

Todays market and competition analyses rarely meet expectations. Or to put it another way: effort and benefit are not in proportion. In our experience, there are two main reasons for this:

• First, simple “product-feature benchmarks” do not provide sufficient insights.
•  Second, obtaining and cleansing the required data is very time-consuming and often does not get the necessary attention.

Successful products can only be designed if, in addition to the “inside-out” view of one’s own products, sufficient knowledge about market needs and the competition is also available. Because only in this way can new products be

• Customer-oriented – successful products solve a real customer problem.
• Differentiated – successful products stand out from those of the competition.

That is why we bring together the three views “market”, “products” and “competition” in our innovative method:

• Comparison of products with market needs provides insights into “product-market fit”
• Comparison of products with the competition reveals own strengths and weaknesses

A successful market and competition analysis is not a project, but a continuous task! To realize this, the necessary database is required – always up-to-date and of high quality. The most promising lever for optimizing the cost-benefit ratio is therefore to automate data gathering and cleansing as far as possible.

Within the innovation project “compass” (Competition- and Market-Product-Alignment) we implement a software based on this idea. Until November we will have some real life experience that I’d like to share with the audience.