Shifting your perspective on competitors

Who or what is your competition? Which product categories are you competing against? Could your own customer even be a potential competitor for the “job” at hand? These are just a few of the questions you should ask yourself to accurately assess the competitive market. Defining your “competitors” too narrowly won’t create a true reflection of the competitive landscape, nor will it explain why customers switch from one solution to another.

Too often “competitive analysis” is a feature-by-feature comparison table of who has what. They take ages to create since you usually have to sign up and/or buy the product to get the full feature list. And then you’re stuck getting a barrage of marketing emails for the rest of eternity.

The thing is, this approach usually completely misses what you’re competing for in the first place. You can only discern the importance and the effectiveness of the features compared once you have more information about the job at hand. Without JTBD you may not realize that you are competing with entirely different things than the products made by other similar companies.

With traditional competitor analysis, you might assume the milkshake competition is between McDonald’s and Burger King.

But JTBD shows us that the job of a milkshake can also be solved by any number of simple breakfast (or otherwise) foods.

People might be searching for simple breakfast ideas for make-ahead meals such as breakfast burritos (my personal favorite).

Or perhaps people who buy milkshakes might also search for “breakfast” along their route to work.

Without JTBD, a newspaper might mistakenly assume it is only competing with other newspapers. But when you understand the JTBD of a newspaper is to be “informed and entertained on your train ride to work”, you understand that Facebook and Twitter are competing with newspapers.

Facebook operates in different segment from Zoom, so Zoom likely didn’t consider FB a competitor. But with FB’s new Rooms product for video meetings, they are now both serving the job of video conferencing—albeit different audiences: businesses and consumers.

Not only does JTBD open up your mind about who you’re competing with, it can help you see an opportunity in a crowded market of incumbents…