[MUSIC] Hi, welcome back. In the last lecture, we learned how to interpret market trends to incorporate in the analysis required for developing your compelling brand. The focus of this lecture is for you to learn how to do a competitive assessment that will allow you to determine what is the space available for your brand. The reason that you analyze competition is because your brand ultimately has to be differentiated versus competitors. You need to have a credible positioning. What good is your brand if you offer the same benefits as your competitor? Customers will then decide on other elements such as price or availability. You want to avoid that. Credibility is also very important for your brand. Imagine that you claim something which in the minds of customers is unbelievable. Then you need to provide the right proof points to make your claims credible. We can learn from competitors which are the ones most commonly used in the industry and the ones that your customers value more. So how do we do a competitive assessment? Step 1 is to define your competitor set, which are the companies that target your customers? Whether they are products competing head to head with yours, or they might be substitute products. Step 2 is to gain insight into how local competitors position their brands in the minds of the customers. How do we do that? By collecting and analyzing their communication, such as looking at arts, their website, through online research, blogs, brochures and through personal interviews with industry people. Step 3 is to dissect the different elements of their positioning. Let's work with this model whereby we will try to find two components of their position. The first one we will call the differentiating benefits or attributes. These are the unique elements that convey the brand, what the brand represents in the marketplace. Our analysis should answer what is the end benefit of the brand? What is in it for our target customers? I will stop here, to clarify the concept of benefits versus attributes. I will illustrate it through a story. Imagine a sales associate at a bicycle store was struggling to get the prospective customer, a man in his mid 30s, to understand his point. He kept explaining that the bicycle has an advanced foam seat. And that is a reason for being so more expansive as compared with other bicycle of the prospect that was evaluating. The look of confusion would not leave the prospect's face, he wanted to say so what, this is an attribute of the bicycle. It is rare that consumers made the connection between the attribute and the benefit it provides. In this case, the salesperson assumed that the customer would be able to figure out the benefit on his own. Which of course we know was the writer's rear end would hurt less when he was writing. The second component we will call reasons to believe. What supports that differentiating claim we have identified? It outlines the proof points or what the brand is claiming to credibly deliver on the positioning. For example, in our previous story, by claiming that the foam was made from a special material that was tested to be more comfortable among 50 customers doing 50 miles daily, you can begin to deliver credibility. Alternatively, you could also claim that is the foam used by a famous bike racer in all of his races. An indirect endorsement from the racer provides the credibility that the brand requires. In the analysis as well as through customer research it is important to differentiate those components which are the differentiators versus those which are tablestakes. What do I mean by this? In some industries, there are certain benefits, attributes or proof points which you must offer, only to be considered by customers. For example, nowadays, smartphones almost need to have a camera to even be considered by any segment of customers. This is a tablestake attribute. If your smartphone immediately improves your photo by correcting for light movement and even your wrinkles. Then that's a differentiator. Having explained these concepts, I want to share with you a real life example in an industry that most of us are exposed to. Residential real estate. Some years back, we work with a very large developer in defining their brand. In step one, we have to define their comparative set. We ask ourselves, should we consider only those in his neighborhood? In the surrounding neighborhoods? In the city? In the county? In the state or nationwide? Since he was building in more than one city located in two states but with plans to grow to the western part of the country, we decided to consider larger players that actually played in the same field. However, we also took into consideration how customers made their decisions where purchasing residential real estate. Was it they wanted a local, a state, a regional or a national brand? For the started customers, the geographical presence was a decisive factor in their purchase. In step two, we collected all of the communication available from each of the developers. We went to each of their sales offices, collected brochures, pretended to be clients, visited their websites, etc. We also interviewed people in the industry and collected their thoughts on how they perceived each competitor. In step 3 we analyze this communication, and let me share some results. All the benefits and attributes of the company's analysis can be categorized into specific functional animal show themes. An example of a functional benefit might have been location. Developers claim to have the ideal location. An example was to claim the most convenient location in an urban and business center because it provided proximity to other businesses. Those facilitating having everyone close. Job, home, retail etc. So this was particularly attractive for people who dislike driving and prefer a city life. An emotional benefit was that they offered an enrichment of your customers life. Enrichment lifestyle meant different things, but it could be summarized as beyond the physical property, end users would actually obtain a whole lifestyle with their property. Or they could maximize their time by striking the balance between working and leisure time. Then we analyze the proof points or the reasons to believe. For those who claim location, they provided the distances between major business center and their buildings, or travel time in public transport or walking. Or they provided a map that showed all of the stores and services available within a short distance over the building. For those who claimed enrichment, they actually mentioned that you could have build long lasting friendships in their development because of the integrated mixed use concept such as a gym, the children's park, the supermarket, etc. It was easy to meet others alike. However, we also discover other tables take elements. Which all developers have to have in order to be considered by customers. These were track record, number of delivered properties, number of dollars invested, number of clients incredentially, it was all about endorsement or partnerships or awards. As you can see, these analysis yields lots of information that will allow us to know how to develop your differentiated and credible brand. Furthermore, we can develop a positioning map to know where there are opportunities to position our brand, let's look at one. In this one, we have chosen two key variables that our target customers used to purchase, amenities and the second one is customisation options. When you place the benefits of obtained from step three above you can clearly see where every competitor focus their position. The positioning map is a great tool to locate white spaces in the competitive landscape. The empty space on the map that no competitor has claimed or filed for yet. You can claim it. The next step in creating your brand is to define which method and model you want to use. The one that laps better to your organization. That is the subject of our next lecture. See you there. [MUSIC]
