Module 2 - Know your clients competition

What is competitor research actually for?

It is to make sure your brand stands out, based on truth and what you are really about. We have gone through the discovery session sheets earlier in this module, and hopefully you will find those really useful and get a lot of value out of them, whether you are working with clients or within your own organisation. Part of that touched on the brand axis, which is placing competitors within a framework of where you sit, and there is also the SWOT analysis of your competitors.

What I want to share now is not another document as such, but an example of how we put together a bit more competitor insight and a bit more competitive understanding, fleshing that out a little more.

As I said, it is not about following every minute detail of what your competitors do, but it is good every so often to benchmark them, certainly online: the kind of followers they have, the communications they are doing, and generally, in marketing terms, just taking a good look at what your competitors are like.

Why does differentiation matter so much here?

Because if you look like everybody else, the consumer has nothing to hold on to. From a positioning perspective, your brand, your product and your service need to stand out from your competitors, not for the wrong reasons, but based on truth and what you are really about.

If your brand, product or service is all blue and all your ten competitors are blue, that sounds really obvious, but it is a problem, because there is no differentiation to the consumer in terms of colour or what it is about. If you are all talking about environmental credentials, again it all just gets a bit washy for the consumer.

So I am looking at what they do, how they communicate, what they are talking about, what kind of visuals they use, what kind of colours they use, and the tone of voice they use. All really important.

What goes into the competitor overview document?

An overview of what each competitor is doing online across the wider funnel. We have recently been working with an outdoor brand, and these are some of their competitors here. Because we are dealing with YouTube, we want to see what their wider funnel is like in terms of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and so on.

You can see the video views. Some of them have got massive ones. Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger and Helly Hansen have a fair whack of video views. It is good to see, because when you build a really successful YouTube campaign and start getting the ads out there, you can quite quickly start to nudge up towards your competitors and get some really great views and results, depending on your spend.

Depending on your business and your resources, you may go to a much broader extent, or you may just keep it as a quick overview.

Why is YouTube the channel for awareness?

Because you get huge view numbers of the right audience, and that leads to good sales. YouTube by far is, for me, the best way of getting more eyes on your brand. You get more of the right people seeing it. From an awareness perspective YouTube is just phenomenal, and if it is leveraged in the right way and your campaigns are built right, which you will learn to do through this course, you too can get some really amazing figures.

Yes, you will have to spend a little bit of money, but it is not beyond the realms of possibility to get millions and millions of views without spending TV money. It is there for the taking. It is a really good opportunity.

What does the analytical half of the work cover?

Landing pages, social activity and post engagement, captured with screen grabs. The overview is more what I would call statistical. It is not really what I would call qualitative. We talk a little bit about the client's competitors, we look at the landing pages, we look at what they are doing on social, and you can see some little screen grabs there that we have done.

We have got quite a good team here, and some of them will look in more detail at post engagement and at the kind of examples the competitors produce.

How do you judge a brand as a consumer?

You land on the site and make a call in seconds, and you write that first impression down. What I always do is approach it like a consumer. I put myself in the consumer's shoes, take a decision, and rightly or wrongly I make a view of what I think of that brand very, very quickly.

I have been involved in quite a lot of financial services work, so I land on, say, the Barclays website and I just find it very typical, boring bank. That is my view as a consumer. That is my opinion. Other people may disagree. We are all entitled to different opinions. But I try to view a lot of the communications of competitors and of the clients I am working on like that, because that is how the punter views it.

So one feels very active, very outdoorsy, perfect for the brand in many ways. With Musto, interestingly, I find it a bit dark and gloomy. It is made for water, but it is really black and white. Why is that? Should there be more colour in there? It might sound like a really obvious thing, but I judge things very quickly. Of course I do then go into more analytical assessment, and at home the team do too.

What I encourage you to do is both. Do a bit of the analytical stuff and the numbers and look at it in more detail, but also make a little note of what your first impressions were. Those first impressions, those first few seconds, are exactly what consumers will be doing when they visit your stuff, when they see your ads and go to your landing page. They will take split second decisions on whether they like your brand or not, your product or service or not.

So I encourage you to do the same when looking at your competitors and your own business. Do it through the prism of your consumer's eyes, split second decisions, and then do some more analytical work.

What do you do with the finished picture?

Use it as a grounding for the strategy, not necessarily as a copy of what the competitors do. We typically do this for all our clients, and we do a lot more work than this, but this is a very quick summation for the client document that we send. It is quite an interesting way of viewing things and it gives you a good grounding, a good overview of what people are up to, how they film things, how they put things together, the colours they use, the tone they use, all of those things.

Understanding what your competitors do is a key component part of putting a good marketing strategy together. Not because you necessarily want to do what they do, it might be that you need to do the opposite, but sometimes you can learn some really good tricks from what they do as well.

There is no right or wrong way. There is no A plus B equals C. It is just about doing a little bit of graft, a little bit of work, looking at what they do and looking at all the channels.

Should you look at offline as well as online?

Yes, and we do. I noticed a TV commercial the other day for one of our clients, and it was prime time TV. I sometimes see press ads or magazine ads. It is still good to get an overview of all the touch points, as we would call them, of where the consumer comes into contact with the brand.

By touch point I mean the moment you come into contact with that client's brand. That could even be how the staff greet you when you go into a branch. The McDonald's touch point is how the staff greet you when you go in to order your McDonald's. Does the name badge say "hi, how can I help you", or is it just the name? It gives you a very different feel. That is a consumer touch point.

So if you really want to go hell for leather and really get into it, and sometimes it is right to do this, then go and experience the brands and the competitors as well and see what it feels like. Go into the stores, touch the product, look at the product. It is a great way of getting a good feel for everything about their business, which I think is good to understand.

Again, there is no right or wrong. You might only want to do a little bit of it, you might want to do the whole thing. That is down to you, your business and the resources you have available.