Beat the most fearsome competitors by focusing on outcomes, not products
Companies conduct competitive analysis to make sure their products and services are better than those offered by competitors. But reacting to feature-to-feature comparisons is no guarantee of success. Competitive analysis, when seen through a jobs-to-be-done lens, is not about head-to-head comparisons. Instead, it’s about assessing how much better or worse a product is at helping the customer get a job done.
Traditional competitive analysis almost always involves a technical comparison of product specifications and features, yet the analysis is conducted without knowing how customers measure value or how much value competing features deliver to the customer.
This is the problem, and the myth that misleads: companies are not competing against other companies or their products. They are competing for the customers, and their one goal is to create value for them. And there is only one way to do that: by offering a product or service that is better than any other at helping them get their jobs done.
To gain such an advantage, a company must know exactly what customer needs are unmet (where customers struggle to get a job done), construct solutions that address them, and refine the processes required to deliver those solutions. And they must do that continuously, so their competitors can’t catch up.
To conduct competitive analysis effectively, all the customers’ needs must be known. After all, customers measure how well they’re getting their jobs done by how well those needs are met. But in nearly all companies, managers can’t agree on what a customer need even is. If they don’t know what those needs are, then there’s no way they can assess how much better or worse a product is at helping customers get their jobs done.
And this is why companies compare product features instead. Unfortunately, this merely leads to feature wars, even when the features are irrelevant. That shouldn’t be the outcome of competitive analysis. Rather, the analysis should provide the information to beat competitors through developing products and services that help customers get a job done better.
Our approach to competitive analysis works because it is built around a solid definition of what a customer need is. We have discovered that customers consider between 50 and 150 metrics when assessing how well a product or service enables them to successfully execute any job. These metrics (or desired outcomes) are the customer’s needs and the power behind our innovation process, Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI).
To conduct an effective analysis, we first uncover all 50 to 150 of the customers’ needs. Then we use quantitative research methods that reveal just how satisfied the customers are with their ability to address each of the metrics when using company and competitor’s products. Using this approach, we can see just where the products (and the competitors’ products) are weak and strong at helping customers get the job done, and where to invest to help customers get the job done better.
This is the ultimate in competitive analysis because the insights come directly from the customers, and the assessment is based on the actionable metrics the customers use to measure value.
We beat the most fearsome competitors by focusing on customer needs instead of on the competitors’ products. Learn more about our growth strategy consulting services.
In this timeless 2002 Harvard Business Review article, Tony Ulwick first introduces the concept of Outcome-Driven Innovation to HBR readers. He explains how Cordis Corporation (now a division of Johnson & Johnson) used ODI to increase its angioplasty balloon market share from 1 to 20 percent by knowing who its customer was and helping that customer get the job done better.
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In this groundbreaking 2008 Harvard Business Review article, Tony Ulwick and Lance Bettencourt reveal an important discovery they made while turning jobs-to-be-done innovation theory into practice: job mapping. Recognizing just who is your customer, a job map breaks down the job the customer is trying to get done in a way that enables us to discover all the customer’s needs.
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In this provocative article in MIT Sloan Management Review, Tony Ulwick reveals how a customer need must be defined within the jobs-to-be-done framework to become a useful input into the innovation process. This article introduces timeless standards for defining the types of customer needs that exist and how we use them to conduct competitive analysis and create customer value.
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Outcome-Driven Innovation is the most effective innovation process in existence today. This white paper, by Strategyn founder and ODI inventor Tony Ulwick, explains why innovation has historically been an ineffective process, the discoveries he made that led to ODI, and how we use it to identify just who is your customer and accelerate company growth.
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This white paper by Strategyn founder Tony Ulwick highlights the business advantages of our ODI methods for capturing and prioritizing customer needs. It explains why traditional voice-of-the-customer (VOC) practices continue to fail and makes a solid case for retiring VOC as a method for understanding customer needs.
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The goal of business strategy formulation is to create a unique and valued competitive position. This white paper by Strategyn founder Tony Ulwick offers a different perspective on strategy, explaining why customer needs (not activities) are the basic unit of competitive analysis. Ulwick also introduces growth strategies that we use to beat the competition.
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What Customers Want, the best seller by innovation thought leader Tony Ulwick, explains what Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) is and why it works. Ulwick, who pioneered jobs-to-be-done thinking and invented ODI, details how ODI transforms jobs-to-be-done theory into a practical method for understanding just who is your customer and an effective process for innovation and growth.
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Choose from a dozen case studies with companies such as Microsoft, Ingersoll Rand, Bosch, and others, and learn how we apply our ODI methodology to identify just who is your customer and help companies grow.
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