What are competing products? 8 ways to collect competitive products

First of all, what is a competitor? Why do we need to collect competitive products?

Competitive products are the products of your competitors and even all products that are worth referring to or learning from. Competitive product collection refers to using various methods to obtain more products that can be used as reference. By analyzing these collected competitive products, it will help us design our own products.

There are two main purposes of competitive product analysis :

• First, it provides quick reference for product models, architectures, and functions for its own product design, or even directly utilizes design points;
• The second is to quickly think about the similarities in the "essence" of competing products, absorb and internalize them into existing products, and obtain various innovation possibilities.

The core idea of ​​collecting competitive products: Under the premise of adhering to the core demands of target users , find as many things as possible that can meet the core demands of users. Taking chat and dating apps as an example, their core appeal is to meet the needs of communication between people. In addition to QQ, WeChat , and Skype, other products that can meet this demand include telephone, text messages, email, and even sign language. These products can be used to meet the same user demands, so they are all among our competitors.

8 ways to collect competitive products

Is there any effective method that can enable us to collect competitive products quickly and efficiently? Below we will use a case to learn how to correctly collect competitive products:

Case: Suppose we now need to design a courseware production software for teacher users that can prepare and teach lessons.

1. Look for competing products in app markets , professional websites, and industry survey reports

The application market refers to the software distribution market, including mobile and PC application markets, such as Google Play, AppStore, Amazon App-store, etc., while professional websites mainly refer to those centered on the Internet industry, such as 36Kr, Zhihu, AppAdvice, TechCrunch, Digg, etc. Industry survey reports refer to those websites that can provide certain industry data, such as iResearch, Baidu Data, Gartner, etc.

In this way, we can find visible and usable competitors rather than conceptual competitors. Often when an App or software goes online, it will be released in various distribution markets as soon as possible to seize first-hand market resources. Therefore, we can often find more suitable competitors through these channels, and by distributing market ratings, download volumes, product introductions, screenshots and other information, we can make a preliminary judgment on the competitors, which will facilitate our subsequent collection and selection.

Table 1 Competitive products collected from application markets, professional websites, and survey reports (taking course preparation software as an example)

2. Use search engines to find competing products

Since the functions of the current major search engines are already very powerful, we do not have to search all of them. We only need to use the two or three most mainstream ones. If the same competing products are searched in different engines, we can keep one of them.

In this way, relying on the big data of search engines, we can find many relevant competing products and expand the scope of our competing products. Search engines will also recommend some related keyword search results for reference. This is also a good way to find keywords when designers are at a loss.

Table 2 Using search engines to collect competitive products

3. Find competitors by interviewing potential target users of your product

Interviewing potential users of the product can not only directly ask which products the current users in the market usually like to use, but also further understand whether users use other alternatives or other solutions when they want to communicate with others, and obtain more competitive products at different levels.

User interviews are actually a way for us to find suggestions and references. For example, if we want to make an educational assistance app, we can consult professionals such as teachers, academic affairs staff, etc. to obtain the competing products they are currently using, and at the same time we can also discover some of their needs. For example: PowerPoint produced by Microsoft and WPS produced by Kingsoft are the two most commonly used competing slide presentation software by users.

Table 3 Competitive products collected through interviews

4. Can the core functions be achieved in other ways?

When collecting competing products, we also have to ask ourselves, can the core functions of the product we want to design be achieved in other ways? For example, similar products of software, physical objects, services, etc. Divide the core functions of competitors into several dimensions for consideration, and work backwards from online to offline. The competitors found can help designers expand their thinking. For example, in the case of lesson preparation and teaching software, we need to find physical objects, services, similar products, etc. that meet the core function of "lesson preparation resources + teaching tools ".

Table 4: Consider the core functions and collect competitive products

5. Some functions have been expanded

For example, when looking for competing products in the chat and dating category, we can expand “chat and dating” to “chat”, or expand “chat and dating” to “making friends”. Different expansion methods can give us design inspiration in different directions. For designers, this method actually helps them find competing products with similar core functions. They can also start from the key functions and look for more products that can be used as reference.

Table 5: Some functions have been expanded to include competing products

6. How do other industries do it?

Designers can refer to how they design products across industries. For example, in the transportation industry, signal lights and traffic police gestures are used to convey communication information. From the perspective of software user experience and user engagement, you can also refer to the practices of the Internet industry.

In this way, finding solutions from other industries can effectively help designers expand the scope of competitive products and learn from more competitive products from traditional industries. After all, before the rise of the Internet industry, traditional industries have always been the most mainstream in the world, and ideas for solving user pain points and needs can often be found in traditional industries.

It is not difficult to find that competitors do not have to refer only to the main purpose of the product. When referring to competitive products, learning from the ways in which competitors achieve their goals in other industries can also give designers different inspirations.

Table 6 Competitive products collected from other industries

7. Find competitors through process and operation fragmentation

This step means breaking down the product's structure, usage process, operation, etc. step by step, and looking for competitors based on each piece of information. Taking educational and teaching software as an example, we fragment the software's functions into lesson preparation, teaching, mobile assistant and other functions, and then look for corresponding competitive products based on these fragments.

Table 7 Collection of competing products through fragmentation

8. Extract keywords through demand analysis of key stakeholders and collect related competitive products

By analyzing the needs of important stakeholders, more keywords can be extracted, and then based on these keywords, more competing products can be further collected. (For more information on how to do stakeholder analysis, please refer to my other article "3 Methods of Stakeholder Analysis: Who else should you consider besides target users?")

For example, after an in-depth analysis of users of chat and dating apps, it was found that in addition to practical functions such as chatting, making friends, and interacting, users have more demands on the product's interface design, video chat, voice chat, etc. We can further collect more competing products based on these keywords.

Table 8 Keyword collection of competing products

Finally, a simple summary of the common methods of collecting competitive products is given below: