1. Why do we need to do competitive product analysis ?
Taking the manufacturers of Jiadian and 3C products that I am more familiar with as examples, enterprises will choose to do internal data analysis during the process of informatization construction.
For example, sales, production, inventory, etc., which are very useful for enterprises to understand their overall operations, but this information is very limited in grasping market trends and understanding customer needs. The analysis of external data can help us make up for these shortcomings.
Competitive product analysis is a very important module in external data analysis, especially for companies that mainly produce home appliances and 3C products, most of their marketing channels are completed on e-commerce platforms through B2C methods.
If we can obtain this part of data, including the operating data of competing brands, and analyze it by comparison, correlation, trend, cause and effect, it will bring unexpected benefits to the business operation, as summarized as follows:
Automatic analysis and processing of e-commerce data is more frequent and accurate, avoiding the problems of information delay, error, omission, and time-consuming caused by traditional manual collection;
Understanding the market share and competitiveness of your own brand products will help you adjust your marketing strategies in a timely manner;
Comparing the price distribution of competing products and planning the price range of your own brand will help penetrate the market;
Analyze the frequency, depth and effect of promotions, formulate appropriate promotion strategies and seize the market;
Analyze brand characteristics, accelerate resource allocation to mainstream products, and maximize market share;
Understand customer reviews and use feedback to guide product and service improvements or innovations.
2. Category Brand Analysis
The first step in competitive product analysis is to find the analysis object, which refers to the competitor. There are many brands of home appliances and 3C products in the domestic market, and the competition is quite fierce. It is easy to find corresponding competing companies and brands according to the market area distribution and product category.
Refer to the mainstream classification methods in the market, and segment the competitive product categories according to product appearance, function, performance, etc., and compare them with your own product category structure to find out the missing and redundant sub-category lists, and then analyze the current sales trends of these categories:
If the market trend of the missing category is favorable, consider introducing the product to seize the market;
If the market trend of redundant categories is low, consider abandoning the category and releasing resources in time;
It helps enterprises adjust their product category structure, follow market trends and avoid wasting resources.
3. Market share analysis
After sorting out the category structure, the next step is to analyze the market share of different categories.
Compare and analyze sales volume and revenue of different categories of the same brand to understand the mainstream product categories of different brands, combine costs, analyze gross profit margin and net profit margin, and determine the contribution of different categories to sales profits.
Analyze the sales volume and sales revenue share of different brands in the same category to understand your market share.
Analyze the trend over time to understand the changes in sales share and analyze the continuous decline. It may be that competitors have carried out promotional activities in advance or lowered prices to avoid disrupting the balance of the brand strategy and causing a reshuffle in the market. You will then be in a very passive position.
4. Price Penetration Analysis
High sales volume of a certain category does not necessarily mean that the sales revenue of that category will be high. Similarly, a high price of a certain category does not necessarily mean that the category will be profitable. For categories with similar key product parameters, price often determines the market trend.
Therefore, it is particularly important to find a price range for your own brand while balancing maximizing the profitability of individual products and market acceptance.
For a single product category, different companies have different investments in product research and development and production. They can be simply divided into three types of positioning: high-end, mid-range, and low-end products. Different positionings also have different costs and corresponding prices. A comparative analysis chart is made between the price ranges and sales of different brands.
If a brand has absolute market share and competitiveness in high-end products, but the low-end product market has mixed brands and low returns, then it can choose a mid-range positioning to promote its products.
At the same positioning level, if competition is fierce in a certain price range, within an acceptable cost range, you can consider lowering the price range to avoid the edge in product pricing, which is very helpful for the launch of new products and market penetration.
Price band analysis can help companies understand their own positioning range and adjust pricing strategies in a timely manner to avoid leaving too large gaps in the price band, which would lead to monopoly by competing products.
5. Analysis of promotional activities
E-commerce platforms often carry out promotional activities based on seasonal changes, holidays or collective activities, such as May Day, Double Eleven, and summer air conditioning promotions.
Monitoring the prices and sales of competing products can effectively identify whether they have promotional activities, and can formulate targeted countermeasures to prevent large-scale market loss;
Analyze the start time, duration, and number of promotions in previous years to determine the frequency of promotions and use this to formulate this year's promotion strategy;
By analyzing the price and sales volume trends during the promotion, and then conducting year-on-year and month-on-month analysis, we can see the depth and effectiveness of the promotion. By comparing the promotion results with those of competing products, it will be of guiding significance for subsequent promotional work.
6. Customer Evaluation Analysis
One of the more important modules in e-commerce data analysis is customer evaluation analysis.
Obtain customer reviews based on product SKU, analyze their positive and negative review rates, and obtain an overall picture of their customer reviews. You can also make a comparative analysis with competing products.
By performing keyword searches on specific evaluation information, we can count some product or service issues that the company is concerned about.
For example, the cooling effect of the air conditioner, the noise level, the random charges for installation, etc., find out the most prominent problems in different categories, feedback them to the product for design improvement, or find products with fewer problems among competitors, disassemble and analyze them for reference and improvement.
Customer evaluation is the feedback on the actual use of the product, which can help companies truly realize the shortcomings of the product's appearance, function, and performance. Improving these shortcomings is also the best way to grasp customers and the market.
7. Marketing Trend Analysis
Through long-term monitoring of one's own data or competitor data, relevant analysis of marketing trends can be performed.
Based on the relatively stable annual sales growth rate and the relatively regular cyclical changes in seasons, holidays, etc., the market demand at the next time point can be predicted in advance, and the company's own procurement plan and production plan can be adjusted in time to avoid a large backlog of goods or out-of-stock situations;
According to the sales trends of different categories, we determine the mainstream products, allocate resources in a timely manner, maximize profits, and promptly clear out and eliminate old products that have no market competitiveness; we analyze the marketing trends of competing products, grasp the marketing direction of competitors, and adjust our own marketing strategies in a timely manner according to the situation.
This article analyzes the market from the perspective of brands and does not involve analysis of the store dimension, so indicators such as customer flow, conversion rate, and orders are not explained.
