Competitive Positioning
Sometimes it makes sense to competitively position your product directly against your rival’s products. It makes especially good sense when the competitor is a BigCo or a recognized leader in the category.
It does not make sense when the competitor is another startup, especially if it’s a weak startup. You don’t want to lend credibility to something that will likely die on its own. You can beat those competitors through your own execution in the marketplace and your own endurance.
If your product is better than the competition, let the world know exactly how. Measure it, quantify it, and be specific. Share what your customers are saying about how your product is better.
Startups can hit their BigCo competitors head-on with direct comparison competitive positioning. If the BigCo is foolish enough to fight back, your startup will gain wonderful validation.
The most important thing to do in competitive positioning is to focus on attributes of your product that actually matter. For ArrayFire, the attributes that matter are speed, the availability of many technical software library functions, and ease of use.
Stability (or goodness of code) also matters and most of our competitors are plagued by bugs. But being stable is not a value-added feature; it’s an expectation. So it’s hard to promote.
Case Study
Do you wish your tablet had a stand so that it can sit vertically on a table? Do you wish your tablet had the ability to receive a USB stick? Do you wish your tablet had a connected keyboard? My guess is that your answers are: No, No, and Maybe.
Anyone watching football last weekend was besieged with the Microsoft Surface commercial below. The commercial ran Saturday and Sunday in premium spots. It competitively positions Surface against the iPad. It competitively positions on those things that no one really cares about for tablets.
I think most people walked away from those commercials thinking, “Boy, if that’s all that Surface has to talk about, the iPad must really be good.”
BTW, iPads can also have connected keyboards, so that one is not even accurate.
This Microsoft commercial is a high-quality production of pathetic content. Well, really the Surface is pathetic. Microsoft marketing is limited to promoting these fringe differentiators.
What people care about are the apps. What can you do with the device? Apple launched the iPad by touting all the apps that people could use.
And price. People care about price. The Surface is cheaper, which is the only good thing the commercial explained.
What are your thoughts on competitive positioning? When have you directly competitively positioned your product against a rival?
From the conversation
Comments preserved from the original post.
gorom
That is why you shouldn’t never compare dog feces to cat feces. They might look similar, smell similar and taste similar but essentially they are different instantiations of a recurrent theme. It is better to to say in the product feature list that the produce supports feces as a generality (thus giving you the ability to check the checkbox). No need to state which type of feces.