Before developing a mini program, product managers all run competitive analysis, an essential piece of work in mini program development. What is competitive analysis, why do it, and how do you do it well? Let’s talk about it today.
1. What is competitive analysis?
Competitors’ products are competing products, and competitive analysis, as the name suggests, compares and analyses them. It mainly covers competitor base data management, competitor process management, analysis itself and presentation, with the focus on building the competitor data structure and managing the analysis.
The content of competitive analysis has two sides: objective and subjective. The objective side circles the angles to examine from competitors’ or the market’s related products and arrives at the real situation; here no personal judgement is added; let the facts speak. The subjective side is a conclusion close to a simulated user flow: based on facts (or personal feeling), list the strengths and weaknesses of competitors’ products or your own. In analysing others’ products, you are in fact walking through the user flow once.
2. Why do competitive analysis?
Before developing a mini program we first imagine what it should be like; perhaps at this moment you have only one idea in mind, with no detailed thinking. What then? Thinking through page by page is hard and time-consuming, and many user habits and experience details are easily overlooked. This is when we can learn from competitors to find design starting points and ideas. Someone will ask: isn’t that copying? Clearly not. Many people do copy competitors directly, but that is not a good thing. Through researching and analysing competitors, you borrow their experience to seek advantage and avoid harm: walk the good roads they walked, avoid the pits they stepped in. Know yourself and your competition, and you will never be defeated.
The core aims of competitive analysis: one, learn from competitors, seeking advantage and avoiding harm; two, before starting the project, check whether the competitor’s business types really meet your profit requirements.
3. How to do competitive analysis well
In competitive analysis we research others’ products as a user, so we need reverse-reasoning ability that analyses from surface to essence.
For the same function, competitors may have different designs. When we design, we often have a material library in mind, choosing the plan that best fits our product from all the options, so in research we also need organising ability, building our own material library.
Finding competitors, finding highlights, discovering defects all need a discerning eye to spot the latent things, so insight is another ability you need.
In competitive analysis, see how others do it, think about why they chose to do it that way, how many design options exist for the same function, and finally summarise each competitor’s strengths and weaknesses.
Above all, competitive analysis must have a clear purpose. How was it done? Why? Is it good? After the research, ask yourself these questions to keep your thinking clear.
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