Evaluating your existing brands placed in the market as an end-to-end experience is important because it will help you understand how and why you should audit your competitor’s products – especially those your brand shares shelf space with.
This is one of the most important exercises you can run through when you’re creating a new product.
Let’s break it down…
Watch my TikTok short on how you should audit your competitor’s products below, or scroll to read the expanded version now:
Step 1: Evaluating the Competition
This is an exercise where you actually purchase a product online. You run through the entire process, all the steps you need to take to actually purchase your competitor’s product.
Think about how much effort it took to find the product, and what you had to search for:
- Was it as easy as your process is?
- What keywords did you have to use?
- Are those ranking keywords for your products, too?
Step 2: Documenting the Process
Surprizingly, this is a really easy step to complete. It’s also pretty fun!
Documenting the purchase processes for your competitor’s products involves capturing a number of details and relevant information, such as:
- Does the product on screen match your expectations when delivered?
- How is it packaged?
- How fast was it delivered?
- What does the packaging look like?
- What does the interior boxing look like?
- What does the instruction manual look like?
- How do you set it up, all the way to actually being able to use it?
And you document the entire process and note all the things that come up.
Here’s where it gets interesting… When you actually do this exercise, you will need to also look at:
- What shipping options are available for your location?
- What kind of email notifications come through to your mailbox?
- What level of customer service was provided?
- When you opened the box, were the instructions easy to read and precise to follow?
- If you had to download an app, what was your experience of using it?
Step 3: Reviewing Your Experience
What was the quality of this experience? What things had you not thought of for the product you’re designing?
This is an opportunity for you to evaluate your own products and their processes, because then you can start to see holes in your own process. These holes may have been part of a blind spot you couldn’t see until you started to audit your competitor’s products and begun comparing the whole process to your own.
Take the information and steps you noted in every step in this process, and analyze it thoroughly. What happened and what did you notice?
This will give you a very clear checklist of things that were either good or were bad, comparatively. That’s a roadmap you can use to make your product experience great, and possibly even greater than your competitor’s.
Let me know how it went for you in the comments below, or reach out to me on any of my social media channels listed below.
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Thank you for reading about how and why you should audit your competitor’s products!
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