Product Management: Understanding the Market

Who is your competition?

Identify key competitors and understand their strategies using various methods such as diverge and converge techniques, perceptual mapping, and mystery shopping. This section will help you build a competitive intelligence strategy to ensure you are well-prepared to outperform your rivals in the market.

Topics Covered

• Apply Diverge Method
  The Diverge method involves brainstorming and exploring all potential competitors within a market, including direct, indirect, and emerging competitors. By considering various categories and segments of the market, this method helps businesses gain a broader view of the competitive landscape. This approach ensures no competitor is overlooked and encourages creative thinking when identifying market threats.
  
  
• Apply Converge Method
  After identifying a broad range of competitors, the Converge method helps narrow down the focus to the most relevant players. You’ll learn how to prioritize key competitors based on factors such as market share, business model, customer base, and product offerings. This method allows you to create a more targeted competitive analysis and refine your market strategy to focus on critical threats and opportunities.
  
  
• Use Perceptual Map
  Perceptual mapping is a visual technique used to position your product in relation to competitors in terms of key attributes like price, quality, and features. By mapping competitors on this visual grid, you can identify market gaps, opportunities for differentiation, and areas where your product can stand out. It helps businesses understand their relative position in the market and adjust their marketing or product development strategies accordingly.

• Mystery Shopping
  Mystery shopping is a hands-on approach to gaining insights into competitors' customer service, pricing, product quality, and overall customer experience. You’ll learn how to conduct mystery shopping activities to observe competitor behaviors and identify both strengths and weaknesses in their offerings. This method allows you to gather actionable intelligence that can help refine your own business practices, improve customer experience, and identify competitive advantages.