In fact, choosing competing products is not that simple!

I don’t know since when the word “competitor” has appeared frequently in my life. Maybe it’s because the proportion of my friends working in the Internet industry is increasing. When hearing about a new APP, I will unconsciously think of its competitors and make a comparison.

When I first came into contact with competitor analysis, I never thought about how I should choose competitors. As for competitors, the categories are so clear that it is effortless to choose. When you see the NetEase client, you think of Toutiao, when you see Uber, you think of Didi Chuxing, and when you see Ali Travel, you look at Qunar .

It wasn't until a personal experience that I realized this choice was not that simple.

At that time, I was interning at a certain website as a product intern in the smart hardware department. Why I chose to go into smart hardware is another story. In short, I observed the celestial phenomena at night and judged that the rapid development of the Internet in the future will inevitably appear in Internet finance and smart hardware. Since I have no financial background and am not interested in it, I chose the smart hardware industry as my internship direction to understand whether it is suitable as a starting point for my future career. The conclusion is that now is not the time.

Continuing with this internship, I joined a project team that was about smart power banks. There are power banks everywhere on the streets, which one can be sold for 200+? The secret lies in its other "smart" feature - wireless storage. To put it simply, you can download an APP on your mobile phone. This power bank can use its own power to transmit WIFI signals. After connecting to this signal with the mobile phone, it will connect to the internal storage of the power bank. The information stored in the power bank in advance can be downloaded to the mobile phone or viewed online, such as movies, photos, etc., which can be expanded to 16G. Of course, you can also upload photos from your mobile phone to save space on your phone and access them at any time.

Of course, based on my own judgment, I feel that this product is not very mature and the user experience is not very good. I usually use it as a thin and light mobile power bank with relatively high appearance. After all, it is thinner and much lighter than a certain Xiaomi popular power bank that focuses on thinness.

As a rookie, my job is to update the product introduction page that was designed by the previous advertising company, but the effect is not very good. The product details page that you can see when you log in to JD.com to buy something is usually composed of several pictures and text. What the picture shows and how the copy is written are crucial for consumers to understand and decide whether to buy.

The initial version was outsourced to an advertising company for design. The content was relatively abstract, and with various metaphors, it did have the feel of a traditional advertisement, but it was incompatible with the advertisements for current Internet products.

After receiving this task, my first thought was to see how the "teachers" did it, so I opened the browser ...

Of course, I logged into the official website of Xiaomi to see how the introduction of its popular mobile power bank was written. After some understanding, I summarized three points:

First of all, don’t use words to describe where data can be used.

Secondly, use more professional terms, preferably those with incomprehensible English abbreviations.

Finally, we use things around us to compare and describe its weight and size, which makes it easier for users to form a perception.

Coupled with the cool web effects, Xiaomi's product display page always looks pleasing to the eye, and you can't help but want to buy it and try it out.

Using this as a template, I chose to improve the promotional page for our product from these three perspectives. Unexpectedly, the boss disliked this plan.

I am clearly following the successful examples of my competitors, so why does it fail for me? The boss's words made me suddenly realize.

Although the main body of our product is a mobile power bank, if we need to design promotional copy and posters, it would be inappropriate to refer to similar mobile power banks.

Because mobile power is a mature product, people know they need it and in what scenarios they use it, so its promotional copy should emphasize its good quality so that it can stand out from competitors with a low price.

Our products are five times more expensive than power banks of the same capacity. It is meaningless to promote their good quality.

As a new product whose functions users are not familiar with, the most important function is to educate users so that they understand under what circumstances they need it, accept it, and purchase it.

After understanding this principle, I turned to learn copywriting from Xiaomi's cameras and sports cameras. After all, these two products are more like new things for most users, and they require education before users can understand their needs and buy them.

From this perspective, I found that their copywriting style is very different from that of mobile power banks. Not all products of the same brand maintain the same copywriting style. In the introduction pages of cameras and sports cameras, a lot of scene construction methods are used. By describing a scene, they tell users that in the same scene in your life, life will be better with this product.

For example, it can tell you that after you leave home, the camera can let you see what your pet is doing, whether anyone enters the house, etc., to help users think about the reasons for the purchase.

Combining these, I would like to highlight this smart power bank, which allows you to enjoy downloaded TV shows and movies on the subway without worrying about a mobile phone with 16G storage capacity; you can upload and back up photos at any time when you go out to play, saving space and ensuring safety; at family gatherings, everyone's mobile phone can be connected to this product at the same time, and you can enjoy the pictures and videos together, etc. In this way, compared with the previous incomprehensible copywriting of the advertising company, this revised version is much more scientific.

This experience also constantly reminds me that for the same product, when facing different tasks, its competitive product choices are not always the same. It is necessary to subdivide the characteristics according to different tasks, find deeper similarities, and then use them as competitors for analysis, so as not to go astray by taking things for granted.