Competitive Landscape Analysis: Mastering Your Market Position

Posted on by Mikko Henrik Pitkänen

Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Competitor Landscape Analysis

Understanding your competitors is crucial for building a strong market position. A competitor landscape analysis helps you identify key players, their strengths and weaknesses, and opportunities for differentiation.

The Competitive Landscape framework is an essential technique in a innovation strategist’s toolkit. It helps you identify your closest competitors and carve out a space in the market that you can own. That is called market positioning.

In this step by step guide, you’ll learn the modern approach to conducting a competitor landscape analysis. This will help you and your team to visually organize competitive advantages and insights and to make strategic decisions faster. You can map out the process by yourself or invite your team to collaborate and give feedback. You can also schedule a free Propellerhat intro session to help you get started in minutes.

Step 1: Define Your Market and Competitor Scope

Before analyzing competitors, you need to clearly define:

  • Market Segment: What industry and niche are you operating in?
  • Geographical Scope: Are you competing locally, nationally, or internationally?
  • Business Model: Are you focusing on direct competitors (same product/service) or indirect competitors (alternative solutions)?

To begin with you need to be able to visually describe the competitive landscape in one slide.

How to do this in practice:

  1. Create a new slide for presenting your Competitive Landscape.
  2. Split the slide in to four parts with two arrows to structure your analysis.

Step 2: Identify and Position Your Competitors

Once you have defined your scope in the competitor landscape, list your direct and indirect competitors. Don’t start by saying that there is no competition! Or that nobody has ever done this before. Also not doing anything is an option for your customers. There are many ways to map competitors:

  • Brand attributes (e.g., playful vs. formal, affordable vs. high-end)
  • Market share (e.g., startup vs. industry leader)
  • Features (e.g., AI-driven vs. manual solutions)
  • Audience (e.g., enterprise vs. small businesses)

Feel free to use any comparison that you see relavant to promote the competitive edge of your company in relation to your competitors. It could be good vs. great and boring vs. innovative! Choose what works for you and make sure that it is understood by someone who does not know as much about your business as you do.

Once you have a thorough list and you have figured out the comparison values place your competitors visually in the slide to see the full landscape.

How to do this in practice:

  1. Position your competitor logos to the slide.
  2. Be prepared to explain their positioning.

Step 3: Identify Your Place in the Market

Now that you’ve mapped your competitors, it’s time to determine your brand’s positioning. There are two key perspectives to consider:

  1. Where is your brand currently positioned?
  2. Where do you want to be positioned in the future? Usually in the top right corner of the slide. Documenting both of these positions will help you refine your brand strategy.

How to do this in practice:

  1. Upload your logo to the slide.
  2. Be prepared to showcase your brands current and future positioning. Note: This slide is always about the future positioning.

Step 4: Get Feedback from Your Team and Advisors

Now that you’ve built a visual competitor landscape, it’s time to collaborate and refine. Gathering input from team members, clients, or stakeholders helps ensure your analysis stays updated as new competitors emerge or market dynamics shift.

How to do this in practice:

  1. Invite a team member, advisor or a trusted client to review the slide.
  2. Take notes and gather insights.
  3. Have a dialogue with teammates to get their attention and feedback.
  4. Adjust, and update when needed.

Step 5: Compare & Analyze Competitors

Once your landscape is mapped, conduct a comparative analysis in form of a table.

Key methods include: SWOT analysis for key competitors.

For each major competitor, analyze:

  • Market Position
  • Price
  • Strengths: What are they doing well?
  • Weaknesses: Where do they fall short?

And continue on with opportunities: Where could they expand or improve? And threats: What risks do they face?

Competitor Matrix is a simple table that can help you to visualize competitor differences. Remember to use analysis that is relevant to your business. Swot can be too simplified to prove your competitive edge. It can be technical, custome value or you name it. What is your differentiator and value proposal that competitors cannot match?

How to do this in practice:

  1. Create a table with main competitors including your company.
  2. Fill in the comparison information.
  3. Ask for feedback and adjust as needed.

Step 6: Monitor & Update Regularly

Competitive landscapes evolve. Keeping your analysis up to date is key to staying ahead. Set up a routine to:

  • Track funding rounds, acquisitions, and partnerships.
  • Review customer feedback on competitor offerings.
  • Monitor changes in pricing, branding, and market positioning.

How to do this in practice:

  1. Update your competitor board as new information emerges.
  2. Set a recurring review session with your team.
  3. Systematically discuss and share insights.

Conclusion

By following these simple steps you’ve now created a clear and insightful competitor landscape that helps you:

  • Understand where you stand in the market
  • Identify opportunities for differentiation
  • Refine your brand positioning
  • Make informed strategic decisions

If you’re just starting your competitive analysis, check out Propellerhat’s coaching services to make sure you are progressing.

In any case: Start mapping your competitor landscape today!